Onamae-wa? Daruma had said to me. What’s your name?
Xander. Musashi. Miyamoto. Why is that important?
I try to concentrate. Really I do. But I don’t feel any mystical energy seeping up through my feet. I don’t feel anything except a pure annoyance that flares as though someone flicked a lighter inside of me. I need to get going. I stifle a sigh.
“Point at me.” Fudō-Myōō turns his sights on me once more. “Like a gun. Point your fingers at me.”
I do, a slightly sick sensation coursing through me. Maybe lightning will come out of my fingers and zap a hole in him.
“Now, take all your energy and blast it through your body, from your toes to your fingers. Point it all at me, and yell.”
“Yell?” This is, without a doubt, the weirdest exercise I’ve ever had to do in all my training as Momotaro. But then again, this is the weirdest teacher I’ve ever had.
“AHHHHHHH!” Fudō-Myōō howls, the sound coming from deep within his belly. His navel disappears as his abdomen is sucked inward.
A surge of energy, invisible but as real as a brick wall, hits me. I’m knocked five steps back, and it takes my breath away.
“You have the same kind of force. That is how you call it up. Soon, you won’t have to make the gesture. You’ll do it automatically.” Fudō-Myōō nods. “Try it.”
The energy dissipates. I inhale to refill my lungs. I definitely felt his blast, but…“I can’t do this.”
“The anger. The sorrow,” Fudō-Myōō prompts.
I close my eyes again, trying to imagine the same kind of power coursing through me. But nothing happens.
“Master it!” Fudō urges. “Make it work for you! It is in your service, not the other way around.”
“It’s not working!” I open my eyes, suddenly furious again. Okay, I’ve got the anger. Now how do I direct it at him? I point at Fudō-Myōō and scream.
My scream doesn’t sound like his did. It doesn’t come from my belly but from my chest. It’s high, strangled, and wailing, like the worst winter storm shrieking through trees.
The ground between us stirs, and a cloud of dirt and grass swirls up.
The cloud dissipates to reveal a dark figure. Gozu?
No, it’s the figure from my dreams. The wraith with my face.
It’s not Jinx’s father at all. I made this. It is me.
I pull out my sword and swing. I miss, the blade whistling through air. The creature hisses, turns away from me, and springs on Fudō-Myōō with its claws raised.
He stumbles backward, clearly not expecting this. He fumbles with his rope, then throws it at the onryo.
The creature bats it aside.
“Xander,” Fudō-Myōō shouts, “catch!”
He throws me the rope.
My anger has been replaced by extreme fear. I manage to catch the rope, barely. I try to lasso the onryo.
I miss.
The creature overtakes Fudō-Myōō, growing into a great black noxious cloud that billows up and over him.
I cover my mouth, gagging, my eyes stinging. “Fudō!” I shout.
The cloud swallows him whole.
I point both fingers and yell at the creature. This time the bellow comes from my gut, and it’s as low as a foghorn. My own voice rattles my teeth. It has the impact of a boxer’s knockout punch, a live grenade thrown into a foxhole, a china plate dropped onto cement.
The wraith collapses and evaporates.
So does Fudō-Myōō.
I’m alone on this empty field.
So much for that lesson.
“Fudō!” I yell, turning around in a circle. “Fudō-Myōō!”
The only answer is the rustling of the grass that stretches out to its endless golden horizon.
My puny lungs struggle to draw breath through the knot choking my throat. An irregular thumpity thump thump sounds in my ears, like my heart is some crazy rock drummer. My mouth is as dry as a handful of gravel.
“Fudō!” I cry hoarsely once more, but I know he won’t answer.
My anger’s all gone. There’s no shrine to kick over. Nothing to fight. How, then, can I call him back?
How in the world am I ever going to find the baku and her master thing?
I sink down onto my shaking knees. I need a moment to think. I take off my helmet and put it down in front of me, noticing that my hands are quivering, too.
Okay, Xander, calm down.
What about that demon that came out of me? The onyro? Did I, like in my nightmares, create a monster that destroyed something I desperately needed?
Did I, Xander Miyamoto, Momotaro-without-powers, just kill the one and only Angry Lord of Light?
I bend the top half of my torso to the ground, my hands in the dirt. I think I’m going to cry and barf at the same time. But nothing happens, not even a dry sob or heave.
“I’m going to die, basically,” I say aloud, my forehead against the earth. My voice sounds wrong in the silent air, like a shout during a church service.
I shake my head. “I’m going to be fine.” This makes me feel a little better. I stretch my arms outward.
My fingers touch something twisted. The rope.
I close my hand around it and sit up. The rope! I hold it in front of me. It’s gold in color—or maybe actual gold, mixed with a few threads of red and green and blue that are soft enough to be silk. I trace the colored strands with my fingers.
Maybe my anger was attached to the onryo. Maybe I got rid of it with the second scream.
Or maybe I merely sent it away temporarily and now it’s back inside of me.
I shiver. Well, I may not be angry anymore, but I’m sure feeling a lot of sorrow. I gather the lasso in a loop and tie it to my belt. You never know when you’ll need a rope. I smooth my silvery old man’s hair out of my eyes and tuck the helmet on top. I place my sword in its sheath. I put my shoes and socks back on.
I really want to head straight back to Jinx and Peyton, but I have absolutely no idea which direction I’m supposed to go in. The baku could be anywhere, right? So I go straight ahead.
Maybe Fudō’s lesson will guide me, somehow. I have to believe that, hold on to it like it’s a boogie board in the open ocean.
After a while, what had seemed like endless horizon actually dips down steeply, as though I’ve started descending some invisible stairs.
I walk for a long time, until it feels like it should be nighttime, but the sky is still as light as in early afternoon. I wonder how my friends are doing. Did Fudō’s flame of healing go out in Peyton when Fudō disappeared?
No. They’re okay. They’ve got to be.
I stop for a second.
What if time moves even faster in this subworld of the first dream world, and when I get back my parents and Obāchan are gone, Jinx is an old lady, and Peyton is…
I grit my teeth and start walking again, faster. I won’t think about it. I can’t do anything now but find the baku.
A hollow opens up below me. The ground is shrouded by a layer of thick fog. I hesitate, watching the mist.
Guess I have to go into it.
I stick one foot through the mist, and hit solid ground underneath.
The fog feels kind of substantial, like steam in a sauna. I put my other foot down cautiously. I can’t see the lower half of my body, that’s how thick the mist is.
When we’re at the beach, Dad always warns me to shuffle my feet through the shallow water. “Stingrays like to lie underneath the sand,” he says every single time we go, so I’ve heard it at least five hundred times. And I always say, “Okay, Dad, okay,” and I shuffle. Only once did I see a stingray leap up, startled, the stinger at the end of its tail quivering, and swim away. I have to admit, I was grateful for Dad’s advice that day.
I shuffle my feet now, just in case I need to scare off any critters. Who knows what could be in there?
Then I hear something that reminds me of whinnying, except it sounds more like flutes than horses. Almost as if t
he animals, whatever they are, are humming a song. Through the mist ahead, I can barely make out a band of four-legged animals frolicking. At first I think they’re the horses we met before, but then I see they’re taller, with long necks and delicate legs.
As I get closer, I notice that their bodies are covered in scales the color of spring grass, like dragons, but they are shaped more like deer. Their tails look like an ox’s, long and hairless, with a broom of lavender fur sprouting out of the end. They have manes, also lavender, wrapping all the way around their jaws. Two sharp horns—antlers, really—protrude from their foreheads, pointing backward.
I slog through the mist, moving as quietly as I can so I don’t scare them off. They barely notice me, dipping their heads into the clouds and nibbling on something.
Oh. They’re walking on top of the fog. Not through it. Their hooves hover, as though the creatures are hummingbirds. They can probably even fly. One bends its giraffe-like neck and delicately takes a bite of mist, the cloud trailing out of its mouth like a piece of cotton candy. I inch closer.
Abruptly it looks up with the calmest eyes I’ve ever seen. I guess it makes sense that it wouldn’t be scared of me—it has probably never seen a human before. Its irises are as dark as its pupils, like wet pieces of onyx.
I stop and hold my breath. The last thing I want to do is accidentally alarm them so they run me over. Because, after all, they can walk on mist. They ignore me, though, so I keep walking.
I break through the other side of the mist and find myself standing at the top of the foggy hollow. Oh no. My stomach drops. Did I just walk in a circle? I should feel frustrated right now, angry at my own stupidity, but I don’t. Being mad would take too much energy.
Good, Xander, I swear I hear Fudō say in my head.
I start hiking again, back the way I came, slogging past the frolicking creatures. I’m definitely going uphill this time. At least I think I am. I don’t have any landmarks guiding me—just mist on all sides. I emerge from the fog again.
And, right in front of me, is the same hollow.
Since I’m alone, I mutter a bad word I’m not allowed to say, and leap back into the mist, not bothering to shuffle my feet.
This time I stop at the dragon-deer creatures, watching them chew. As they dip their heads, some of the cloud disappears, and now I notice there are blank spots where the animals have grazed the fog away.
Huh.
If I could somehow encourage them to eat enough cloud, then maybe I could see a way out of here.
I cautiously approach one of the creatures. “Hi,” I say in the super-soothing voice I use whenever I talk to a scared animal, like the kitten that Inu once found stuck under our house. I hold up my hand so the dragon-deer can sniff it.
Something nuzzles my side, wet through my shirt, and I jump in surprise. Another one of the creatures. I shouldn’t be surprised that it moves quieter than a cat.
Soon all of them are gathered around me, nosing into my pockets, testing the edibleness of my sword with long black tongues, licking my hair. I wish I had some food to offer them. I wonder absently if they’d like face apples. I pet one of the creatures on the neck, cautiously, and it doesn’t flinch. Its scales are sparsely covered with fine fur, softer than a bunny’s. “You’re pretty.”
It blinks its large eyes as if it’s saying, Yeah, I know.
I scratch it under the chin, and it closes its eyes and emits a purr. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get out of here, would you?”
It doesn’t answer. Of course. That would be too easy.
I walk forward, and they follow. I go to the left, and then the right, in a zigzag pattern, and they stick near me but go back to grazing. Eventually they lose interest in me altogether and wander off. But they’ve left behind a maze where they ate away the mist. All I have to do is go through it to get to the other side of the foggy pasture.
I follow the path until I come to the edge of the cloud valley, where the land rises up again. At the top of the rise, I see sunlight and a different kind of forest. I know I haven’t been there before.
Phew. “Thanks, mysterious dragon-deer creatures!” I call back.
No response.
Of course.
I continue toward the brightly lit rise and the new forest, no longer hesitating as I make my way through the rest of the fog. The ground is as sticky as a kitchen floor with pancake syrup dripped all over it. I try to get through it as quickly as possible. My feet make a suction cup sound as I lift them.
Then, just as I’m about to begin my climb up the hill, my left foot steps down into nothing. A hole. I try to catch myself, but my right foot is snagged by the stickiness. My knees buckle and I fall face-first into the opening.
I don’t even have time to scream or think before my feet hit a new ground, a squishy landscape slightly firmer than a trampoline. I land with a bounce, putting my hands on the ground to steady myself.
I look up to where the hole was, but instead of mist, I see tree roots above me.
What?
Yup. I’m underneath a bunch of trees. It’s not dark—I can see light between them, so I’m not belowground.
I shake my head. Well, nobody ever said a dream world would follow any of our rules of physics, right?
I seem to be in some kind of tunnel, with the trees as the ceiling and the ground rising up in curves on both sides. Luckily the ceiling—or the ground, or the sky, or whatever it is—is at least eight feet above me. So I have plenty of room.
There are only two ways to go: straight ahead, or turn around. I check behind me. I can’t see what’s at that end. There’s nothing visible in front of me, either.
“Eeny meeny miney moe.” I point in both directions. “Catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go.” When Peyton and I were younger, we figured out that this rhyme always ends on the second of two people or objects. So, at school, if we ever had to choose between one of us and another kid for a team or something, we always made sure to start the rhyme on the person we didn’t want.
But when we wanted the choice to be random, we’d add, “My mother told me to pick the very best one and you are not it,” because we always forgot which one it would land on.
I end up pointing in front of me. “That direction it is.”
I begin to walk, gingerly, because the ground’s still kind of bouncy. As far as I can tell, it isn’t rubber or anything, just regular dirt covered by small, multicolored pebbles.
Maybe the trampoline surface will help me go faster. I take an experimental leap, and the bounce propels me up and forward. I start running.
Rocks and twigs hit me as I stir them up. A pebble lands in my mouth, and I accidentally crunch down on it.
Chocolate oozes out. Delicious super-milky chocolate that tastes like the Cadbury bars my dad once bought me in an English import shop.
I stop and pick up another small pebble. Cautiously, I bite into it.
It, too, is chocolate with a candy coating. I grin. Maybe this place isn’t so bad. I wonder what the twigs taste like—licorice?
I break into a jog, the candy stones bouncing all around me. Soon the ground grows squishier, and debris falls down from the tree roots that dangle overhead. A big clod of dirt hits my face and I catch a whiff of it. The best-smelling chocolate. Like that box of See’s Candies my grandmother buys every Christmas. My mouth waters.
Is it safe to eat, I wonder? My stomach growls inhumanly.
I keep running, and more chocolate chunks fall down. There are worse things in the world to be attacked with, I suppose. As the pieces hit, they melt down my face and arms. I lick my cheek. Sweet.
Then I hear a buzzing from somewhere above.
I skid to a halt. Bees? All my jostling must’ve woken them up. I can’t see them, but the humming gets louder and louder, and it seems to be coming from the base of one of the trees.
I’d better keep on moving.
A flock of birds appears. They are the size of crows but str
iped yellow and black, with great flapping wings and…
Those are not birds. They have stingers. They’re not bees, either.
Hornets.
I back away until my shoulder blades are pressed into the curved wall, sinking into the chocolate dirt. Now it seems sickeningly sweet. I remember sitting outside with Peyton on summer days, Big Gulps at our sides, hornets trying to get into our drinks.
They’re attracted to sugar.
The hornets swoop down and up, like a cresting wave. The leader stops right in front of my face, hovering there. It’s the size of a Chihuahua. Its enormous head, as big as a navel orange, has black mandibles that clack audibly. Its antennae swivel toward me. Its black faceted eyes are seeing hundreds of Xanders right now.
I can’t help it; I scream like a toddler lost in a haunted house. Spinning on my heel, I sprint back the way I came.
The hornets rear back, like a slingshot, and then zoom forward after me.
It’s no contest. The insects surround me in a great cloud, halting my progress. Their buzzing is overwhelmingly loud. They beat me with their wings; it’s like thousands of paper fans hitting me, except I’m not cooling off. It’s the opposite—they’re heating me. I’m dripping with sweat, as though I’m trapped in a sauna.
“Stop!” I shout. I take out my sword and swing it around, hoping to hit at least a couple of them.
They seem to hesitate then, their wings stopping all at once, like an orchestra that has reached a rest in the music. Then one lands on my hand, and I see its lower region stab the flesh.
I don’t scream this time. I just turn back the way I originally came and run, clutching my sword in my unhurt hand. There’s no pain yet—just a slight burning sensation.
I run faster than ever before. Maybe I can find water to jump into. Or shelter from the rest of the swarm.
The hornets buzz all around me and begin fanning their wings even harder. The air heats up. I try to increase my speed, but I can’t get enough oxygen. I slow down, my hands on my thighs, gasping for air.
They close in tight, their wings slapping my face and body, banging against my helmet, and it feels as though I’m being smacked with dozens of rulers, over and over again. The air is so hot, hotter than when we visited Death Valley in August. I sink to the ground, draw my knees to my chest, and tuck my head, shielding my already sore hand and praying I don’t get stung again. The organs inside my torso churn and wiggle, and my heart beats so erratically I’m afraid I’ll pass out. I can’t breathe; I’m choking. I squeeze my eyes shut and know without a doubt that, somehow, this wing flapping is killing me.
Xander and the Dream Thief Page 16