The Nightmare Garden

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “No,” I told Casey, swiping at my bloody nose. “I have no idea if this will work. But I have no other options.”

  “I hear you there,” Casey murmured, and then whipped around at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Inside!” she hissed, the fear back in her face. Later, when this was over, when things were back to how they should be, if I still knew her, I needed to ask Casey exactly what the Brotherhood had done to her, why she feared them so much.

  They wanted to keep me locked up and use my talents as a weapon, and had tried to do the same to my father, so I doubted her story would be pleasant.

  We crouched inside the stairwell, which was icy cold compared to the rest of the Bone Sepulchre, shivering and watching our breath form thunderheads as it escaped our mouths. The footsteps approached, passed and retreated. Casey doubled over, gasping with relief. I looked up, cringing when I saw the broken steps in the ice-covered spiral staircase leading up into nothing. “At least we’re not afraid of heights,” I said.

  Casey shoved her hands into her armpits, shivering. I already couldn’t feel my exposed skin. If Crosley didn’t catch us, the Arctic chill might. This wasn’t a cold you could shake off—it could stop your heart, freeze your skin and kill you between one breath and the next. We had to be quick and get back to where it was warm.

  Casey and I climbed, clinging to the railing that remained in a few spots. Wood, like metal, would peel the skin off your palms at these temperatures. The steps groaned beneath our weight, the same bone-cracking sound the ice had made around the Oktobriana. It was almost a relief to have a tangible fear, something concrete I could concentrate on rather than Tremaine and Draven. Fear of plummeting to your death was a lot easier to cope with than fear of being exiled to the Thorn Land and having your boyfriend killed.

  Casey’s foot slipped through one of the gaping holes in the ice, and she grabbed at me. I grabbed the railing in turn, but the bolts ripped free from the wall. I let out a scream that was choked off when I hit the floor. Casey clung to my leg, dangling in space through one of the concentric holes, as if the floor had been burned away. I felt myself sliding backward and grabbed for a ridge, which mercifully held. I tried to pull us up, gasping. It felt as if I were being ripped apart. My fingers slipped, slicking the ice with blood, and I knew I was going to lose my grip, and then we were going to fall. The thought didn’t make me particularly panicked—it was just a fact, a hard fact.

  “Aoife,” Casey gasped. “Don’t let go!”

  “You’re going to have to climb over me,” I gritted out. “Use me to get to the next step.”

  To Casey’s credit, she didn’t argue. To mine, I didn’t scream when her weight increased exponentially and I felt a sick, wet popping in one of my elbow joints.

  Her foot hooked in my belt, and then her weight was off me and her hands were around my tingling wrists, pulling me up by any bit of shirt or skin she could grasp. We both sprawled on the icy floor atop the spiral staircase.

  I couldn’t remember when I’d been in more pain. Though, on the bright side, I wasn’t cold any longer.

  Once I’d gathered my breath and my wits, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t stand just yet, and my arm was on fire, but I was alive, and I decided that for the time being, that was enough.

  I saw we were at the top of the Bone Sepulchre, in a spire barely large enough for four people to stand shoulder to shoulder. I poked Casey with my good arm. “Are you all right?”

  “More or less,” she panted. “Can’t stop shaking.”

  “We’re lying on ice,” I said, and giggled. There was no rationality behind laughing—I was just glad to be alive, even with a busted arm, trapped at the top of a frozen spire. I tried sitting up and found it wasn’t an entirely impossible feat.

  The spire room wasn’t polished like the rest of the Bone Sepulchre. The ice was rough here, icicles dripping from the ceiling, as if we were standing inside a pincushion. The walls were covered with black marks, and the floor, when I managed to clamber to my feet, was jagged and uneven.

  “This is nuts,” Casey said. “We’re never going to get back down those stairs, and Mr. Crosley will skin me alive for sure.” She looked ready to cry. I held up a hand.

  “It’s going to be all right, Casey. With any luck, we won’t have to climb down anywhere.” I hoped, at least. I really didn’t have the faintest idea.

  But then I saw Tesla’s Gate. It sat in a corner, almost as if it had been shoved against the wall and forgotten, like unwanted holiday decorations in someone’s attic. Spindly and wholly unlike the Gate the Erlkin had constructed in the Mists, the whole thing rested on three squat legs, like a hat stand. A pair of metal arms arched overhead, a giant circuit connected at the top to a Tesla coil, which was attached in turn to a bulb of aether, sickly opalescent white with age and disuse, that barely moved any longer.

  Two dials were attached to either side, just waiting for somebody to activate them, and I shivered, a shiver born not of cold but of pure excitement. This was the experience I’d hoped for, when I’d been holding Tesla’s journals. This connection, across time, to a man who’d envisioned such a thing, such a delicate piece of machinery that had the power to move whole bodies between worlds.

  I couldn’t waste any time, I knew. Casey was right—by now, somebody had to have discovered we were both missing from our quarters. I checked for a power source, but the coil was it. I activated it and was rewarded with a spark of electricity before the thing began cycling. I was elated, but Casey shrank back.

  “I don’t like the look of that thing,” she said. “Lots of faulty machines back in the Rustworks would kill you if you touched ’em. And that one looks rickety.”

  I approached the Gate slowly, reaching out with my Weird. The coil was snapping and the ancient aether was drifting around inside its teardrop-shaped globe, but nothing pricked my Weird. The machine was, for all intents and purposes, alive but dead. It didn’t function, not even a whisper beyond the ions of electricity I could taste on the back of my tongue.

  My hopes sank. A faulty Gate I could fix. But one that was simply dead, a lump of iron where a vortex into other worlds should be? I had no idea how to fix that, and my Weird wouldn’t help me if I did.

  I tried both dials and was rewarded with electricity writhing across the ground as the Tesla coil released its pent-up energy, but there was still no flutter in the fabric of the space around us. Nothing. My Weird felt nothing. The machine was as dead and cold as the ice field outside.

  I wanted to sob, scream, to kick at the Gate until it fractured, but the destruction all around us put me off. At one time or another, the Gate to the dreaming place had worked. I was missing something.

  Be smart, Aoife, I told myself. Be an engineer. The Gate had both a power source and enough power in the aether to transform the dimension around us, but what did it lack? What, if I turned in this schematic in an Academy class, would I get marks off for?

  Tesla. It began with him, it ends with him. Tesla was the connection. Tesla connected the Iron Land with all the others. Controlled the wild energy of the vortex between worlds. Beat back the Storm he’d caused even as he’d opened us up to unimaginable horrors.

  He connected worlds, and his Gate needed a connector. Something to close the circuit that arced energy all around the spire, making Casey shriek with each new bolt, even though the offshoot of the coils was harmless.

  “Don’t be frightened,” I told her. Maybe if I said it to someone else, I could take my own advice. It wasn’t very far to step into the rain of castoff electrical charge, to stand myself between the two iron bars that made up the main part of the Gate.

  “What are you doing?” Casey shrieked as the coil amped up to a roar. I felt a spark of life in the machine, just the faintest one. I opened my Weird, hoping it wasn’t the last time I would do so.

  This time, though, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt as if I’d always been meant to be here, standing in the center
of the only Gate to reach past Iron, past Thorn, and directly into the dreams of everyone in every world. This wasn’t a machine I was touching. This was the fabric of reality itself. I nudged gently, and I felt the vortex grip me.

  Just one more step.

  The Dreamer’s Domain

  WHEN I STEPPED into the center of the Gate as it came to life, power humming through its every mechanism and rivet, I felt it close around me. The energy snapped off my skin and sent blue streams of electrical fire arcing toward every corner of the small room. “Don’t worry!” I shouted at Casey, who was plastered against the wall, eyes as wide as they would go. “I’ll be all right!”

  Of course, I really had no idea. But I didn’t care. My Weird filled my mind, cool and deep as diving into a bottomless pool.

  My vision turned into endless light as the coil arced brighter and brighter. The Gate was too powerful, no longer part of me but a tide pulling me under and replacing what made me Aoife with the unrelenting strength of the Weird.

  I spread my arms, embracing the ride, feeling electricity arcing from my fingers, my hair, my eyelids. The violet light of the aether whirled around me, obscuring the ice tower, obscuring everything.

  The falling sensation gripped me, and it was far stronger than the hexenring or the Gates in the Mists. This was being pulled into a vortex, not transported from place to place.

  Fading, the light bleeding away into blackness, I saw the thousand skies above me again and was frozen for a moment before I felt the breath sucked from my lungs and the stars blinked out, one by one, as I passed into unconsciousness.

  I felt something brush across my face. Not a hand. Something more like a feather or a cobweb, light and insubstantial as breath on my cheek.

  Opening my eyes was a tremendous effort. Everything about me was heavy, most of all my thoughts, which were moving at the pace of sluggish snails.

  Was I lying unconscious somewhere, or dead? Was any of this real?

  It was my dream, I realized, but tethered to the painfully real, as every part of my body could attest. Above me, I saw a glass ceiling looking out onto a gentle blue sky studded with a few white clouds, delicate as spun sugar. A wind blew them apart and re-formed them into new shapes. Pink sunset blushed at the edges, and for a moment all I could do was stare through the spiderweb cracks in the glass.

  “I like this time of day.”

  I rolled my head to the left and saw bare white feet surrounded by the hem of a black robe, moth-eaten and nearly gray from wear.

  The figure in black was no longer shadowed and covered by illusion and my own mind’s dream projections. His chest was bare, plain black trousers hidden under the robe, which he shrugged off and let fall to the floor. His hair was slicked back from his face, curls gathering at his neck. His eyes were strange, not silver like a Fae’s but white and ever-changing, like smoke under glass. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The dream figure was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.

  “You’re the first person besides me to see it in a very long time,” he said. “It happens in the winters of the worlds, the same sunset all at once, when things are desperate and broken and on the verge of cataclysm everywhere else.”

  The sky darkened to blood-red, blood dried to puce, turned to crumpled blue velvet and then darkness, studded with winking stars. The figure sighed. “And it’s over.”

  I swallowed. My throat was tight and sore, as if I’d been screaming for hours. My voice, when I found it, was barely a rasp. “Am I dreaming?”

  “No,” the figure said sadly. “You’re awake, Aoife.”

  Then I’d made it. The Gate had worked. I felt like screaming for joy and sobbing with relief all at once. “I’m … This isn’t my dream?”

  “No. You’re here, in the center of all worlds, the place that is not a place,” the figure said. “The real here. The here that can no longer hide under the veil of sleep.”

  “I’ve been here before, though, and thought it was real,” I said as the ticking of the great gear reached my ears. I was still unwilling to believe that after all I’d been through, I’d finally done something right. “I’ve dreamed exactly this a lot of times. Standing here and talking to you.”

  “I know, but dreaming you’re here isn’t the same,” said the figure. “People dream their way here sometimes, or at least they used to. They put their images up on that glass there, make this place what they want, not what it is when you actually exist in it or when you come to it through a Gate. Except you. You could see most of what was really here in your dreams, but not all. Part of you still saw what you wanted to.” He gestured at the place. “Does it really look anything like you wanted? Now that you’re standing here with your body and not just a fragment of your mind?”

  I swiveled around to take in my surroundings from my vantage on the floor. The floor itself was thick with dust and grit, and covered in the skeletons of small birds and mammals, feathers and bones decaying under my hands and feet, which I could feel with the realism of the waking world. It was as if things had been trapped behind the glass of the dome and never escaped. The throne and the great gear so prominent from my nightmares were in reality dilapidated, the seat propped up under one broken leg by thick cloth-bound books, the regalia flag tattered beyond recognition. It blew back and forth in an invisible wind. Actual cobwebs swam from the ceiling in thick banks like rain clouds. The gear itself was rusty, and it ticked with a sonorous groan each time it moved. The air had changed when I stepped through the Gate, was stale and sour and ancient against my face.

  In the light, in reality, it was as far from what I’d expected as a true face was from a blurry photograph. I felt crushing disappointment. This place couldn’t help me. Nothing here was more than a poor imitation of my dreams of setting things right.

  “You’re disappointed,” the figure stated, as if he could read my mind. I didn’t deny it.

  He sighed, moved away from me, and sat at an ornate dining table hidden in a shadowed corner, large enough to seat twenty. A tarnished candelabra was at his elbow, candle wax flowing across the surface. The single chair wobbled under even his slight weight. “It’s been unseen for a long time,” he said. “I used to have a place across every world, even if it was only in people’s dreams. But when they put gates and guards at all the entrances and exits …” He sighed, his breath kicking up some dust from the tabletop. “Those things are broken now. The dreams have stopped coming.”

  I flashed on Dean. I sleep tight beside you, princess. Valentina, Cal, my father and even Draven had all made mention that they hadn’t been dreaming.

  How could I not have seen it? The broken Gates were fracturing not just all the physical Lands, but the metaphysical one as well. This dream place was drying up. That fact left me with one burning question.

  “Why do I still have dreams?”

  The figure shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious. “You’re not dreaming when you visit me. You’re touching something you can’t quite grasp. Like the man who built that contraption you used to get here, you can lift the veil, the perceptions put in place by space-time, and you can see the worlds as I see them from here. It’s your gift, both of you.”

  “Tesla? Tesla came here?” My voice came out a high squeak, and I felt an impending sense of panic of the worst kind. This was all wrong. My dreams were dreams. Reality was reality. Without that, I might as well be mad.

  The figure nodded. “Nikola was a troubled man. A man who thought he was going insane, until his science helped him realize he wasn’t having visions. He had a gift, and where some controlled fire or water or air, he controlled reality itself. His gift was trying to show him what he could do, but unfortunately he never believed that what he’d done was a worthy thing. When he realized that he could use his gift to build those Gates, he thought he’d brought about the end of the world.”

  He stood up again as I stared at him slack-jawed, trying to process what he’d just told me, and moved to stand in fro
nt of the great gear. The skies outside changed in time with its agonized, rusty ticking, becoming stormy and dark. Lightning arced from place to place, and the ground under my feet vibrated with thunder. I wasn’t scared of what was outside, but I was terrified at the implications of this man’s words.

  “He didn’t destroy the world,” I said in a whisper. “The Storm made it a bad place. A hard place. But the Iron Land still exists.” This couldn’t be true. My Weird was machines. It was iron, steam, aether. Gears and wheels, turning in time with my mind.

  My Weird was not this, not this power to rend reality. I’d already done enough of that.

  But how else to explain how I’d come here? I hadn’t fixed the Gate with my Weird—it hadn’t been broken to begin with. It had come to life at my very presence. Almost as if it had been waiting for me.

  I started shaking, and knotted my hands together to hide it. Fixing the Gate in the Bone Sepulchre hadn’t hurt. Not one bit. My Weird usually crushed my brain, compressed and remade it, every time I tried to use it, but this time … this had felt right. I had to consider that the man from my dreams could be right. Maybe machines weren’t my Weird. Maybe manipulating machines was just a side effect. Maybe, really, Tesla and I were the machines, made of bone and blood and magic rather than iron. Machines able to open the doorways between worlds with our thoughts.

  It wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’d heard of since I’d left Lovecraft. I looked back at the dream figure. “Tesla wasn’t afraid of the Gates,” I said. “He made them for a reason—he made them to keep people safe. Maybe what grew up around them was bad, the Fae and all the creatures creeping into the Iron Land, but …” I trailed off, frustrated and confused by the whole conversation. I’d come here to make things better and I’d only found more questions.

  “It’s not the Gates Tesla was afraid of,” the figure said. “He was afraid of them.” He pointed out at the storm, which billowed across all the skies now, blanketing us in iron-gray violence and bright white lightning. Rain began, spattering patterns across the glass, and every time the lightning flashed, I caught a glimpse of things with blind eyes and long tentacles, writhing and racing and fighting among the clouds, growing closer and closer with every heartbeat, every boom of thunder. I drew back, even though, exposed inside a glass dome, there was nowhere to hide.