Dream Keeper

by Amber R. Duell

His breath shuddered against my hair. “Please, never ask me to help you do something that reckless again.”

  “It worked though,” I said with defiant cheer and fisted the fabric of his shirt to hold him close.

  “Should that make me feel better?” He stepped back and scanned my face. “We haven’t even begun the dangerous part of this plan, and I feel as if I’ve died a thousand deaths. Are you sure you won’t reconsider? Wait here or go be with your sister at the hospital while I wake her up?”

  The idea was tempting. I had no idea what we would find in the Nightmare Realm, what we would face. If the things waiting for us were anything like the creatures that the Weaver brought here... I swallowed. “I have to go with you. Katie doesn’t know who you are. I can get through to her and convince her to wake up. She might think you’re one of them.”

  His eyes flashed. “I could never be mistaken for a nightmare, Nora.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know.” He chewed on his bottom lip. “I know. Sorry, I’m a little tense.”

  I squeezed his forearm with one hand and opened the pocket of my fleece with the other. At least the weather here was always comfortable, so I wasn’t dying of heat anymore. I hoped the same could be said about the Nightmare Realm. My stomach churned with a mix of hope and dread. I pinched the threads between my fingers and held them up. They wriggled weakly before falling limp. “Here.”

  “We just need one.” He loosened the knot and plucked a single thread from my grip, wincing. “Put the other two away. It isn’t enough to bind the Weaver but keep them safe in case we need to do this again.”

  “Will we?” I whispered, my brows lowered, watching him work.

  “I hope not.” A thin, almost invisible line of sand rose up to join the thread, surrounding it, then slowly sank into the fibers. The thread squirmed in the Sandman’s palm.

  “What are you doing?”

  His eyes flicked up to mine, his head cocked. “I’m... giving it a lobotomy, I guess. Taking control of its mind.”

  “Its’ mind?” I squinted at the piece of thread. The other two suddenly weighed down my pocket. “Are you saying they’re alive?”

  “It’s an unborn nightmare.” The Sandman picked it up between his index finger and thumb and shook it.

  “You had me steal nightmares?” My jaw hung open, and I lightly punched his shoulder. “Are you crazy? Why would you let me do that?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t let you do anything. As I recall, I explained what we would need, then tried talking you out of it.”

  “You could have warned me,” I half shouted. “I’ve been carrying those...things...around with me for hours.”

  “If I warned you, you still would’ve done it.” He gave me a knowing half-smile. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, okay? I will next time.”

  “Next time,” I grumbled. There had better not be a next time. I was lucky I didn’t pee my pants in that storage unit. “Now what?”

  The Sandman pinched the thread until it stiffened, as straight as a needle, and took my hand. “Now, we try not to be afraid.”

  I bit my lip. Even if I didn’t want to be afraid, even if I somehow managed to talk myself into feeling safe, there were going to be things I couldn’t shake. I remembered the small nightmare that ran at me and the one that followed. How many more were there? How many were worse? I shivered.

  “We can find another way,” he offered.

  “Is there another way?” If there were, if it were preferable to this, I imagined we would have done it already. And now the Weaver was pissed. We were out of time and options.

  He pressed his lips into a straight line and tightened his grip on my hand, giving me my answer. “I’ve linked the nightmare to Katie’s cord. I’ll use that connection to guide us through the Nightmare Realm to where the Weaver is keeping her mind.”

  Jealousy sparked in my chest at the mention of the other cords. I knew he helped other people in a vague sense, that he had a life outside the hours I spent with him, but I never realized how little I knew about it. He knew everything about me—my friends, my family, school, work. What did I know about him? A laundry list of how his world worked? I knew his morals though. His subtle movements, his habits, his likes and dislikes. That seemed like enough when I didn’t believe he was real, but now I wasn’t sure. “I’m ready to go.”

  He turned, looking down at me with an expression that rocked my resolve. It was a look full of knowledge and pity. He knew exactly what we would find outside of his Dream Realm. Not the specific nightmares, perhaps, but the scope of what waited for us. All the things I never faced because he had shielded me, and now he was leading me straight into the heart of their world. To where one wrong move could place me in the Weaver’s hands.

  “You’re sure you won’t stay?” he asked again.

  “Positive.”

  He drew in a deep breath and kissed my temple. “Then don’t let go.”

  Darkness swallowed the world, dragging us from beneath the bright starlit sky and into an inky black. It pulsed around us, a thousand times stronger than when I felt it the first time in Katie’s room. The familiar tang of metal coated my tongue, throwing me back to the first night I felt the brush of air and found Katie screaming in her bed. I reached my free hand out to grip the Sandman’s shirt.

  “I can’t see anything,” I whispered in a shaky voice.

  “Wait,” came his reply, soft, steady, and close.

  Soon, shapes appeared in the lightening landscape. The sky faded to slate blue, the grass balsam. As more colors emerged, each maintaining a grey hue, I realized we were standing at the bottom of a jagged cliff. A smooth, silver lake reflected the peak. Low lying vines with pointed red and yellow thorns surrounded us. They scraped faintly at my ankles without drawing blood.

  “Sandman?” I asked, needing to hear his voice again.

  “This way.” He tip-toed toward the lake. I followed in his exact footsteps. Each one was long and leaping until the thorns gave way to packed dirt. “Stay on this side of me,” he said under his breath, moving to stand between me and the water.

  I stared at the pond, and something broke the mirror-like surface. Two eyes protruded upward from a thick scaly forehead. The black orbs blinked, matching my stare. “What is that?”

  “It would be impossible to know all their names. Don’t stare,” the Sandman warned. “It might take it as a sign of aggression.”

  Two more sets of eyes joined the first. I shifted so the Sandman’s side blocked them from view. My heart was probably pounding, but I felt nothing. I was too numb, too stunned. I expected to enter a fiery cavern, complete with walls covered in shackles and echoing screams of tortured Dreamers. Not this. The stark setting was almost pretty in a macabre way, but I felt the danger hidden behind it. Lurking. Waiting. The unknown threat scraped against my skin, ached like a sickness in my bones. This was not a place to admire the scenery.

  The thread in the Sandman’s hand swiveled right, and he altered our course away from the water’s edge. I breathed a sigh of relief, though I still felt the dark eyes of the water creatures at my back.

  “They know who we are,” he said. “They’ll report our presence to the Weaver.”

  I shuffled closer. “Not what you want to tell me if I shouldn’t be scared.”

  But of course, they would. Deep down I’d assumed as much, which was why we had to be quick. How far was the Weaver’s Keep from this place? How close was he to finishing his new threads? I shouldn’t have stayed at the hospital so long. Two and a half hours passed by the time I made it into my bed. Less than twenty-two left until he was undoubtedly ready to come for us. For me. Unless he decided to attack with his old nightmares.

  The Sandman inched closer. “Katie isn’t far.”

  I leaned into him, forcing myself to look straight ahead. “Is she okay? Did they hurt her?”

  “I… don’t know.”

  For as well as I knew him, I had
no idea what his face revealed. I knew that pause though, so I studied him, concentrating on memorizing what his worried face looked like instead of the distant metal-on-stone scraping I heard to our left. The slight droop of his mouth. The strain around his eyes.

  “What I told you before about holding all the power in your dreams?” He turned to follow the thread’s direction again. “It doesn’t hold true for nightmares. The creatures that live here are their own beings.”

  I discreetly patted the meat mallet I tucked in my waistband before bed. “I’ll do whatever I need to do to save my sister.”

  “Good,” the Sandman said. We slowed and approached the entrance to a cave. “Here’s your chance.”

  The opening in the mountainside seemed to stretch forever into the darkness. A putrid odor wafted from the narrow crevice—rot and decay with an undercurrent of something sweeter. I slapped a hand over my mouth and nose. “What is that?” I asked without breathing.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  I gagged. “Katie’s in there?”

  “It seems so.” He turned his head and hid a cough in his shoulder. “Any idea what she’s afraid of?”

  Nothing scared my sister. She rode every rollercoaster she found, went skydiving for her eighteenth birthday, and was the official killer-of-bugs in our house. She ate weird food. Got a tattoo. Katie faced life with a fearlessness that I had admired my entire life. “She isn’t afraid of anything.”

  He wheezed. “Everyone is afraid of something.”

  My lungs screamed for air, and I forced myself to inhale. Kettle corn. The sweetness in the air was kettle corn. Like the kind Katie accidentally dumped on the woman in front of us at the circus when we were little. Right before she ran, screaming and crying, from the striped tent. “Clowns,” I said. “She’s afraid of clowns.”

  The Sandman paled, his jaw set. His hand dipped into the leather satchel at his hip. The sand was swirling together before he had it out of the bag. Once it stopped shifting, he held out a small gleaming knife and gave me the smallest wisp of a grin. “You can never have too many ways to defend yourself.”

  I tugged the meat mallet out of my waistband, holding a weapon in each hand. “Noticed this, did you?”

  His grin widened a fraction. “It isn’t exactly subtle.”

  I blushed. “So, should we...?”

  “I can’t.” He scanned the rocky ledges above the opening. It wasn’t until the scraping sound came again that I realized it had stopped. And now it was right on top of us. “It’s planning to defend its territory.”

  “All the more reason to come inside.” I followed where he was looking, then glanced at the opening again.

  He shook his head. “We can’t risk getting boxed in. If I’m wounded too severely by anything, I can’t guarantee we’ll get out before the Weaver finds us.”

  “But—”

  “Go wake Katie up. I’ll kill it and be right behind you.” His hand dove into the satchel again. “Go, Nora.”

  A high-pitched laugh echoed from somewhere above our heads. My heart rammed against my chest, and I threw myself into the dark passage. The walls narrowed the further I went, scraping my arms through my sweater. Then, without warning, it widened again, opening into a vast cavern. The ground squished, sponge-like, beneath my feet, releasing a fresh wave of the pungent odor.

  “Oh, my God.” I breathed into the crook of my elbow and tightened my grip on the weapons.

  I squinted into the darkness, blinking hard until my eyes adjusted enough to see Katie shackled to a hospital bed floating in thick pink goop. My pulse roared. There was no way to reach her, no bridge or rope to swing on. How did the nightmares reach her? Unless they didn’t. My chest tightened. It wasn’t the time for foolish wishes. Of course, they did, and there was no telling what state she would be in. If I didn’t want anything worse to happen, I had to get over there and wake her up.

  I nudged the goop with the toe of my sneaker. It wasn’t as thick as it looked, and it didn’t eat away at my shoe, but that didn’t mean it was safe. If it was, there wouldn’t be a point to floating Katie in its middle, but there was no other way to get to her.

  With a deep, shaking breath, I waded into the reeking liquid. A spotlight on the ceiling flickered to life with the movement. “All right,” I said both to myself and Katie. “No big deal, right?

  The sharp snap of popping bubbles was the only reply. Bubbles. Great. Bubbles meant air. Air below the surface of the pink goop meant... I didn’t know what it meant in this place. Nothing good.

  “Katie?” I sloshed the last few feet to the bed. “Can you hear me?” Her body remained still, the only sign she was alive was the shallow movement of her chest. I set the knife and mallet down on the mattress and worked the buckle of the brown leather cuff around her wrist. “It’s me. Nora. You have to wake up, Katie. We have to go home.”

  The cuff splashed into the thick pink liquid, and I reached across the bed to free her other wrist.

  A series of thuds resonated through the entrance to the cavern followed by a manic laugh. My stomach heaved. How long could the Sandman fight? He said he wasn’t strong enough to beat the Weaver again, but he had to be strong enough to beat a nightmare or two otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” I shouted in Katie’s ear.

  Katie stirred with a soft moan. I slapped her face so hard my palm stung. “No,” she murmured. “No more.”

  “That’s right. No more.” I sloshed to the end of the bed to free her ankles. “Wake up so we can go home.”

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Nora?” Her voice cracked. “Is that you?”

  “Yes. It’s me.” I smiled, laughing despite myself. She was conscious—a step in the right direction. My fingers fumbled with the last buckle. “Come on.”

  “No.” She kicked out at my hands, one foot still tethered. “It’s not you.”

  I hurried to her side and snatched the weapons up before they fell. “Katie—”

  “Get away,” she shrieked.

  “It’s me.”

  Katie shoved me, and I stumbled back, the goop splashing up to my shoulders.

  “Katie.”

  “Go away, go away, go away.” She covered her face with both hands. A million angry red pinpricks covered her skin. “Please go away.”

  A large bubble bloop-ed between us. Ripples danced across the surface, and I froze mid-step. Fear swelled in my chest. I scrambled to shove the panic down before whatever lurked nearby noticed. Clowns and... I had no idea what else the Weaver would use to torment her. “We have to go,” I said slowly. “Right now.”

  Katie sobbed on the bed, curling around herself.

  More manic laughter floated down the tunnel, followed by the Sandman’s roar. We didn’t have long. I took wide steps toward Katie, twisting my body with each one, and something slithered against my kneecaps. I bolted onto the bed beside my sister and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “It’s me,” I whispered. “Nora. Your sister. Your birthday is December Fifteenth. You have a scar on your knee from falling off your bike when you were nine, and I have one on the top of my foot from when you dropped the curling iron the day of mom’s wedding. Our dog, Bear, was fourteen when we put him down. You slept with his collar for a month.”

  The longer I spoke, the less Katie’s shoulders shook, but there wasn’t time for a complete history of our childhood. A flash of white broke the surface before disappearing into the sludge again. I choked back a scream.

  “Do you remember those hideous shoes you begged mom for?” Another flash of white. “The ones for homecoming?”

  The head of a snake broke the water, rising up, up, up. Its underbelly was covered in pearly white scales, and the fur lining its back was sticky with the foul-smelling liquid. I met its yellow eyes and words froze in my throat. A thin black tongue sliced the air before its jaw unhinged to reveal several rows of razor-sharp teeth. Its hood flared, black and white speckled feathers spanning th
e width of the cavern, and a spray of pink splattered the walls. Its hiss filled the cave.

  I dug my fingers into Katie’s shoulders. “Wake up,” I screamed.

  The snake lunged.

  “Katie!” I stood, straddling her legs, and slashed with the knife. Swung with the mallet. They both met nothing but air. “Open your damn eyes.”

  18

  The Sandman

  I didn’t mind happy clowns with big hair and colorful clothes. Those were fine, but these... Clowns in the Nightmare Realm were the reason people had phobias. One glance had the potential to ruin someone for life. I shook out my hands. “Come on,” I said under my breath.

  There wasn’t an infinite amount of sand here, only what I brought with me in my satchel. Each grain had to count. I scooped a healthy amount into my palm and formed a metal handle across my palm, with one end sharpened to a point. From the other, a heavy spiked ball hung at the bottom of a thick chain. I tested the flail, swinging it gently, and turned my attention to the opening Nora disappeared into.

  The biggest danger lay outside, but that didn’t mean the cave was safe. It was a risk—a horrible, stupid risk, but one we had to take. If too many nightmares found us, if I was too wounded to defend her, this would all have been for nothing. It was best if nothing followed Nora inside. She was strong and independent. There was nothing I could do to stop her from going after her sister. Nothing I was willing to do, anyway, so I had to trust her the same way she trusted me. If there was anything in there with Katie, it would know better than to kill Nora when the Weaver needed her alive. If anything came out of the cave with her, I wouldn’t let it take her, but she may have to fight. She would likely have to fight. Why hadn’t I spent the last five years teaching her combat skills?

  A small pebble bounced down the cliff. I squared my feet and scanned the area it fell from. A blur of white and red with a blip of yellow flashed against the dreary rock. I gripped the smooth handle of the flail as two grating honks sounded from behind me. My back prickled, and I knew without turning that the nightmare was there. In one swift motion, I bent, ducking, and spun while throwing the spiked ball at his knees. The clown leapt over it as if he were jumping rope, and his oversized shoes squeaked when he landed. I backed away to give myself more room to maneuver.