Ashes to Ashes and Cinder to Cinder

by Cameron Jace

  “Who said I want you to want to know me?” I finally said over his shoulder. Bella omitted a laugh.

  “What?” he said as he started drawing a circle in the ground around the mirrors and the corpse. “I can’t hear you.”

  I gritted my teeth, as I am sure he did.

  “Who is this guy?” I asked Bella. “And what is he doing exactly?”

  “I am a Dreamhunter.” Loki answered instead over his shoulder then he went on explaining to the helping men that the setting with the mirrors in the circle is called a Dream Temple, which is the place from where a Dreamhunter can enter the witch’s dream after performing a certain ritual.

  “And what do Dreamhunters do?” I asked, folding my hands in front of my chest.

  “The name is self-explanatory. What do you think a Lawnmower does? Oh yes,” he looked at the sky with his forefinger on his lips. “He flies a spaceship—I mean he mows a lawn,” he bent over and rested two Obol coins over the skeleton’s eye-sockets. I knew of these coins. One if the coins fell through the hole in the witch’s skull. “Oh. Sorry, wrong size,” Loki talked to the corpse and pulled out a properly sized coin to put on the corpse’s eyes again. This one fitted. Bella chuckled. “Awesome. Sorry. I thought you were a coin size 5. My bad.” He continued talking to the corpse.

  “And why do we need a Dreamhunter?” I asked Bella.

  “Dreamhunters are the only ones who can enter the dreams of immortals—” Bella explained.

  “Usually with the purpose of killing them in their dreams.” Loki interrupted her as he stabbed the skeleton with a vampire stake, still not looking at us. “You’re not immortal, are you?” he teased me.

  Bella rolled her eyes. “If the skeleton is who we think she is, it means that she is immortal.”

  “I don’t want to know and I don’t care who she is by the way.” Loki felt the need to interrupt again as he pulled out an egg timer like the one my used in the kitchen and a red fleece from his backpack. Who was this guy?

  “Immortals don’t die,” Bella explained to me. “You know that, right?”

  “Never?”

  “Never,” Bella confirms. “The only way to kill them, sort of diffuse them, is in their sleep while they are dreaming.”

  “Wow. How does that work?” I raised an eyebrow, pretending I didn’t know as I knew a lot about this. The last time I was in grand grand father’s dream, I have actually seen the Evil Queen herself.

  “Dreamhunters, like Loki here—“ Bella said.

  “Which are very rare.” He added as he stretched down on his back next to the skeleton.

  “Dreamhunters have the ability to enter the dreams of the immortal. In their dreams, the immortals sometime don’t know who they really are. In fact, they build universes of their own. The Dreamhunter kills them in that dream. The immortal’s mind gets kinda hung up and paralyzed. Being killed in a dream could do that to you. And they stay in a coma forever in real life. It’s the only way to kill an immortal.”

  “But this witch was burned.” I remarked.

  “Which proves she died in her dreams,” Bella explains. “Or they could not have killed her in real life.”

  “Still, she could be just someone who was wrongly accused of witchcraft in the 13th century like others,” I suggested. “How do we know she is an immortal?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out now when we enter her dreams.”

  “She is dead. How can she be dreaming?”

  “Believe me, she is dreaming. Immortal dreams are infinite and never stop as long as they are not awake in the real life.”

  “If I am to believe that,” I considered. “You said that she will be someone else in her Dreamworld.”

  “That’s usually true,” Loki interrupted again. “But the ritual I am using will send us right into a memory of hers. A memory within a dream.” Loki said. “It’s hard to explain. You have to experience it yourself,” Loki stretched out a hand toward me. “When you come down here and sleep with me.”

  “What did you just say?” My face knotted.

  “I didn’t mean it that way. What’s with girls not having anything on their minds but that?” He shook his head, and of course, Bella still laughed. “Besides, if I want to sleep with you, would I want to do in a grave with a skeleton as bed? Argh. I mean sleep as in really sleep? The snorting kind of the sleep.”

  “I don’t snort.” I said.

  “Yeah. I know. All girls don’t snort on the first night then it’s a Bambi the elephant sleeping next to me. Anyway. Come lay down with me—I mean next to me and this beautiful fried up corpse so we enter her dream.”

  “How about you sleep with your skeleton girlfriend without me?” I attacked like a mad rabbit.

  “He needs you with him,” Bella explained. “You’re the one who can identify her in the dream. He doesn’t know anything of what we do or what she looks like, and he isn’t interested apparently. It’s part of your investigation.”

  “Thank you,” Loki nodded at Bella. “What was your name again?”

  “Bella.” She turned around abruptly to face him.

  “Thank you, Bella. Sorry I didn’t ask about your name before. This beauty took the words out of my mouth.” He pointed at the corpse.

  “That’s because you’re a jerk.” I interrupted him.

  “And what is it about jerks you like so much?” He wondered.

  “He is a jerk,” Bella whispered to me. “But if you want to know, you have to go with him.”

  “Ok.” I nodded and climbed down the grave. “What should I do with this?” I asked him about the bag he gave me as I lay down on my back next to the corpse.

  “Oh. That’s the magic dust. Give it to Bella,” he said. “All you have to do is pour some of it on our eyes when I tell you,” he explained to Bella. “This will put us to sleep into the dream. Then, this egg timer of mine will buzz in about thirty minutes. It will wake us up.”

  “We can hear this stupid egg timer in the dream?” I wondered.

  “Don’t make fun of my egg … timer,” He said. “And Bella, if we don’t wake up in thirty minutes for whatever reason, you’ll have to break one of the mirrors to break the connection with the Dreamworld.”

  “Ok.” Bella said.

  “But you have to do it without entering the Dream Temple or you’ll be sucked into the dream and I can barely take care of one girl. Ok?”

  Bella nodded.

  “Ready, Alice?” He tilted his head toward me as we lay on our backs with the corpse between us.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “It’s written in your beautiful eyes—”

  “What?”

  “On your necklace, I mean. Should we hold hands?” He stretched out his left hand.

  “Is that necessarily?”

  “I am afraid so. It’s the ritual rules. In the past we had to prick out fingers and kiss first, but they changed that and moved it to wedding ceremonies.”

  “I can’t believe I am doing this.” I said as I stretched my hand. I lied again. I just needed Loki to help me locate Cinderella in the Dreamworld without him knowing.

  “Yeah. That’s what girls always say in the beginning too.” He grabbed my hand firmly without hesitation. I liked it but I wouldn’t tell him.

  Loki looked at the corpse irritatingly. “Thank god we’re not really sleeping together, or this would have been a deadly Ménage à trois.”

  “I swear if you don’t behave, I’ll kick you ass.”

  “Better wait until we’re in the Dreamworld. Killing immortals in the Dreamworld is really fun. Just like in video games,” He said. “By the way, the fact that you could kick my ass is the first thing that makes me want to know you better. Keep up the good work. I might like you after all.” Even though his arrogance was unbearable, he smiled genuinely at me for the first time. “And now, I need a word that if I whisper into the corpse’s ears, it will remind her of where you want to go into her dream. It’s called an Incuba
tor: a word that will trigger a certain memory in the dreamer’s mind.”

  “Interesting,” I mused. “So we can actually get into a past memory of hers?”

  “A bit of both. A memory and dream,” He said. “So what’s the word?”

  I thought for a second, arguing with myself if I wanted to tell him that the word is Cinderella. This is who I was looking for. But no. That would be leading the corpse to what I want to know. Besides, this corpse wasn’t Cinderella. This corpse, if she was who I thought she was, could only tell us about the whereabouts of the real Cinderella who had been cursed and buried in a dream since long ago, and it was my job to find her and help her.

  My ancestors gave me that job me, to find the characters we thought were only fairy tales and to remind them of who they really were before it got out of hand. We have only one chance to find them once every hundred years since 1812 when my grand grand father wrote the tales.

  “Murano.” I said. “Murano is the word.”

  “Isn’t that an island near Venice?” he asked. “The one famous for manufacturing glass? They had the best glassblowers in the world, right?”

  “So you’re not an airhead, huh.” I said.

  Loki laughed. He had a magnificent laugh, one that I’d like to see and listen to in my dreams.

  “Hey Bella,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  Bella nodded impatiently. I suddenly got the feeling that she envied me, that she wanted to be with Loki in the grave.

  “If the corpse snores while we are in her dream, shoot her.” Loki said. I can’t stand snoring humans, dead or alive.

  Bella stuck out her tongue at him. “What if you snore?”

  “Easy. Shoot her.”

  Bella laughed.

  “It’s time for you to use the magic dust on us,” Loki said, “And by the way, did Edward and Jacob ever make out in that movie? Because I’ve been waiting for this to happen all the time.”

  Then I went to sleep, entering an immortal’s dream, looking for the real Cinderella.

  ***

  Time feels so real and present in here.

  Entering the Dreamworld of an immortal seems too easy, I think. I just woke up, coughing, and lying on my back in what looks like an abandoned house. There’s that smell of cinder everywhere as if someone is burning something nearby.

  “Shhh,” Loki grips my hand, looking around suspiciously. “Rule number one in an immortal’s dream: Look for a killing weapon.” He whispers.

  “I smell cinder,” I say, freeing myself from his grip. “Pick yourself some.” I stand up and walk out of that abandoned building.

  “And do what? Swallow it and puff out ember like a dragon?” He says as he follows me outside. “Hey you … uhm … what was your name again?”

  “My name is Alice!” I shout over my shoulder. I can’t believe how rude he is. He called me by my name in the real world.

  As I step outside, a broad smile sweeps over my face. I guess the Incubator word worked just fine. This is exactly where I wanted to be in the witch’s dream: Venice, Italy, hundreds of years ago.

  “No freakin’ wonderland,” Loki bursts out after me. “Alice.”

  Even though I know I need to find the witch and complete my mission, this boy really gets on my nerves so I turn around and face him, gritting my teeth and clawing my fists. I think his rudeness in the real world is different from the Dreamworld. There, it was arrogance. Here, his is trying to cover that fact that he is scared.

  “You’re that last person on earth to make fun of names, LOKI!” I spit accidentally on his face. I didn’t mean to. “What kind of name is that? How can you even live with it.”

  “Wow,” He rolls his eyes – those beautiful green eyes. So distracting. I have to get him to wear shades in this glaring sunlight or something. “I didn’t know my name turns you on that much.” Unapologetically, he pulls me closer again with one hand. It’s a rough pull but my body closes in toward him in a theatrical way as if this was a rehearsed move in a Tango dance. I find myself resting my hands on his shoulder. He wraps his other hand around my waist and throws a most-devilish young-blooded smile at me. Why does he have to be so attractive? I don’t need this. I am on a mission.

  “Wanna make out?” He blurts, titling his head seductively to one side and gazing at me from the corner of his eyes. His gaze is different from other boys I’ve met. His gazes wanders from my eyes to my chin then to my lips in a triangular gaze repeatedly as if he is afraid to miss a part of my features. Then he pulls me even closer and whispers in my ear, “Make-outs in the Dreamworld don’t show up in your real world resume. Making out in a dream is almost the perfect crime.”

  As much as a restless jerk he is, there is that sound in his voice, that tingle in his touch, and that warmth in the palms of his hands that makes me trust him in an annoying way though.

  “You can’t be serious, right?” I can’t tell him he is a jerk again since I have seen how he has an instant comeback for that.

  “Stay put,” he whispers in my ears, hugging me in the middle of the street in Venice, hundreds years ago. What a perfect romantic place, even in a dream, but maybe with the wrong boy. “Pull me closer to you. Act as if you can’t live without me one second of your life.” He whispers – Ok. Now this is lame.

  “You wish—“

  “Just do it.” His voice changes into a darker color drastically.

  That’s when I get what’s going on.

  I hug him back, looking at the pedestrians eyeing us everywhere, walking past us in their centuries-old outfits. Instead of being dazzled by the beauty of old Venice, they all stare at us.

  “What’s going on?” I ask Loki.

  “We have to act weird and outrageous as possible,” He whispers back. “We came into the Dreamworld with our jeans and t-shirts form the 21st century. They can simply tell we don’t belong here unless we act like totals loons kissing and making out in public, which will explain why we look so different. They have to think that we are weirdoes, and that what we wear is some kind of an occult divergent from the norm.”

  “I am not going to make out with you in public.”

  “That’s what I thought,” He pulls my hand and walks slowly through the crowd, looking for a place to hide. We could hide in one of those abandoned buildings on the right. “You look like a homey girl to me,” He adds. “Every dream has those characters who for some wicked reason might know you’re an intruder.”

  “At least that means we’re sure the witch is an immortal.”

  “That’s true.”

  We hide in one of those buildings after he sharpens a piece of wood into a stake.

  “She is not a vampire.” I protest.

  “I know, still stakes work, even with ex-girfriends. I don’t have time to explain to you how the Dreamworld works.”

  “And we’re not here to kill her.” I add.

  “That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t love to kill us,” He says. “So what is this place? Where are we?”

  “We’re in Venice, around 1291, in the witch’s dream.”

  “And what is your mission here? We only have very little time for me to help you accomplish what you want from the dream.”

  “I need to find the witch and save her.”

  “Save her? I usually get into immortal’s dreams to kill them.”

  “This one is different. Can’t you see she is already dead in the real world. This one has one last mission in the Dreamworld to accomplish. We have to help her finish what she was meant to do.”

  “I am not going to ask what that is. So how are we going to find her?”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” I say, pointing out at the streets through a huge crack in the wall. The water outside the abandoned building runs like streets with boats sailing through it. “Look at all those glassblowers everywhere.”

  Loki peeks outside and I imagine that he sees the endless numbers of glassblowers scattered in the streets, men and women with an exquisite fine art, makin
g and selling the finest glass in the world.

  “As much I would like to appreciate the wonderful art. Why is that of importance?” He asks.

  “At this time in history, Venice had the best glassblowers in the world. It was a new art with new secrets that almost only the people of Venice knew about,” I explain as my eyes look for the witch. “But if you look closer, you’ll see how all of the glassblowers use enormous amounts of fire to do that. Fire is needed to melt the sand they use into shaping the glass.”

  “I was going to comment on that heat filling the walls everywhere in such a water-splashy city,” Loki points out. “And speaking of walls, the houses are all built of wood. Such amounts of fire will burn down the city eventually.”

  As Loki says that, we see a sudden fire eating up a house on its second floor. A woman jumps out of the balcony down into the water while she is holding glassblowing instruments in her hands. “Speaking of the devil—I mean the glass.” Loki raises an eyebrow.

  “That’s exactly why we are here.”

  “You mean why you are here. I am just the Dreamhunter, like the guy who stamps your ticket in the movie theatre and makes sure you get in and out safely.”

  “Anyway,” I sigh as the locals run to put down the fire. “This is a historical day in Venice, because within minutes, the local authorities will start to transport all glassblowers out of this city to an island nearby that is called Murano.”

  “Why?”

  “In the books of history, they will tell you that it’s because of incidents like the one you have seen of the house being accidentally burning by the glassblower woman. The many glassblowers in the city were threatening the city to burn down eventually. Even though it was an original art, the using of fire was too dangerous. Murano is an island near Venice where they could blow glass and make fire all they want.”

  “A smart move.”

  “Except that this not the real reason. The truth is it’s because of a woman called Bianca.”

  “I assume Bianca the Kentucky-fried-witchen we just entered her dream.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “You’re actually two inches smarter than most of the boys I met.”

  “Two inches?” Loki raises and eyebrow then stares down at his crotch.