Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  “However, we are anxious to hear your testimony before deciding the case,” Whim added.

  Will rubbed the back of his neck to stall for time. Everyone was talking so quickly, the way people who had known each other for a long time often did. He was having a hard time keeping up. “Ah, who’s the True Dream Walker?”

  “Your teacher, who wears his symbol around her neck at all times, hasn’t told you about the TDW?” Whim asked with a laugh.

  “The True Dream Walker opened the first archway to the Dream,” Deloise explained to Will. Winsor’s eyes narrowed, and Deloise quickly continued. “According to legend. And supposedly someday he’ll return to bring permanent balance to the three universes.”

  “And Josh believes in him? That’s what the flower charm is about?”

  “Well,” Deloise said, “I don’t know if she really believes in him.”

  “He’s more like her idol,” Whim put in. “He’s her guiding light.”

  The picture felt somehow incomplete to Will. He wondered if he would ever get the opportunity to talk to Josh about it; personal beliefs weren’t at the top of the list of things she liked to discuss with him.

  “So, about the cotton-candy machine,” Deloise said.

  Will shrugged. “I didn’t see it happen, so I can’t really vouch one way or the other.”

  Whim lifted Winsor’s right hand—which was in a cast—into the air. “Sister, I declare you the winner of this debate. Would you like to make a victory speech?”

  “No, I would not.” Winsor carefully tugged her hand away. “Where is this drawing you were going to show me?”

  Whim produced a very thin, very sleek laptop. “One of my many faithful readers says she saw the trench-coat men in a nightmare, and she did these drawings of them.”

  The first image showed a sinister man in a green-black trench coat. His shoulders were massive, hulking, and he reached out with hands that looked like rakes made of flesh. Black boots leaked green sewage water. The whole picture was overblown, a sort of caricature drawn with colored pencils. But the green hat with its black band and the overall feel were right.

  The second image showed the man’s rubber gas mask and the canister peeking over his shoulder. The artist hadn’t gotten the tank’s color quite right—it was too silver—but she’d included both gas masks.

  “That’s them!” Deloise cried. “Look at the eyes!”

  The eyes were the clincher. No white, no irises, no pupils. Just a shining black expanse.

  “It’s the same guys,” Winsor agreed.

  “What does this mean?” Will asked.

  Whim stabbed the trench-coat man’s face decisively with one finger, causing the laptop’s screen to blur. “I think they’re connected to the sick people.”

  “Don’t start with that again,” Winsor snapped. “It’s absurd.”

  “Not if you connect the dates—”

  Ignoring them, Deloise said, “So, the trench-coat guys must be getting publicity from somewhere. Maybe comic books.” She tilted the laptop’s screen to get a better look at the images. “He looks like a comic-book character.”

  “What happens when we find out who he is?” Will asked.

  “Then we know how to fight him,” Winsor said. “He has to have a weak spot.”

  “So, you don’t think there’s any chance he’s…” Will hesitated and then decided to admit what he’d been thinking. “That he’s a real guy walking around in there?”

  Deloise’s eyes moved quickly from Will to Winsor, as if she, too, had wondered. Winsor didn’t laugh, but she didn’t seem to take the idea very seriously, either. “Highly unlikely.”

  “But definitely possible,” Whim said. When Winsor shot him a look, he added, “According to modern dream theory.”

  “Don’t be condescending,” Winsor said tartly.

  Whim sighed. “I’m not.”

  “You are! That’s your Ha-Ha-Winsor-Can’t-Take-a-Joke voice.”

  Whim sighed again, letting his head fall back on the futon’s arm and his eyes roll at the same time. “Okay, Winsor, I’m sorry.”

  He’s not sorry at all, Will thought, just as Winsor spun the desk chair to face Whim. Her nostrils flared, and she said, “You know what, Whim? My tolerance for taking crap from you is zero right now, because I’ve been taking crap from you for the last six straight months, so don’t you—”

  “Is that what this is about?” Whim asked, not bothering to sit up. “I sent letters—”

  “You sent postcards. And now you show up with Haley?”

  Will must have missed something. What did Haley have to do with this?

  “Oh, I get it,” Whim said with a morose smile. “You wanted me to drop him on the side of the highway before I came home.”

  “You could have called to say he was coming here. You know things are weird between us.”

  Whim chuckled. “Winsor, look, it’s not my fault you cheated on him with Ian, okay?”

  Will felt like he’d just walked onto the set of a soap opera. Winsor had dated Haley? And cheated on him with Ian?

  “Golly,” Deloise said, shoving Whim’s legs off her lap and rising from the futon. “I don’t think Will and I need to stick around for this. We probably have homework to do, or spaceships to build, or…”

  “Baby seals to club,” Will put in, although he was tempted to stay and see how much more he could find out.

  “You’re a jackass,” Winsor told her brother, who laughed. Neither of them was paying Will or Deloise any attention as they escaped into the hallway.

  Deloise yanked the office door shut behind them and blew out an exaggerated breath of relief. “I think I need my aura cleansed.” She shook her head. “Before you came in, Whim admitted that he and Haley had been traveling around since last summer. Whim graduated last year, but Haley’s missed more than half his junior year! I don’t even think his mom knows—she probably thought he was living here and going to school with us.”

  Living here? Will wondered, and then remembered the empty second-floor apartment. “His apartment’s still empty, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. He slept in Josh’s room last night.” Deloise made a face that suggested she knew how Josh would feel about that. “Don’t tell her, okay? ’Cause it would just upset her, and he’s already acting, like … strange.”

  Will hadn’t met Haley yet, so he couldn’t help asking, “Strange how?”

  Deloise glanced up and down the hall as if making sure no one would overhear them, then dragged Will into Kerstel’s office. A desk with a towering hutch, an overburdened bookcase, and two filing cabinets were crammed into the tiny space.

  Deloise pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, and a moment later she was showing Will a series of photographs. “Look at these,” she said, holding the phone out to Will.

  The similarities—and differences—between the twins were astonishing. They both had curly black hair and hazel eyes; they shared the same tall, slim frames. But Ian’s hair was trimmed into a cap close around his skull, there were smile lines at the corners of his eyes, he carried a decent amount of muscle, and he was dressed in slightly preppy clothes that Will was sure Deloise appreciated. Ian jumped off the page, making Haley look like a pale afterimage left in his brother’s wake. Aside from his greasy hair, Haley seemed to be wearing a black or navy-blue T-shirt and stained jeans in every picture, and he slouched so badly that he was more than an inch shorter than Ian. It was obvious from his uncertain and panicky expression that the camera made him nervous.

  “You can see how different they looked, right? They always looked like that. I mean, nobody ever had trouble telling who was Haley and who was Ian.” She stuck the phone back in her pocket. In a half whisper, she continued, “But when Haley showed up yesterday, he had his hair cut just like Ian’s used to be, and he was wearing Ian’s clothes. He was even standing like Ian. And Josh kept calling him Ian in the hospital, because she hit her head when the slide fell on her, and she called him Ian, lik
e, ten times, and he didn’t correct her once. One time he even answered her. Like, what is that? You’re into psychology, right? That’s not normal, is it?”

  Hell, no! Will thought. Aloud, he said, “Well, grieving is its own thing, and twins have their own kind of bond, and maybe this is just how Haley is grieving. Everybody does it differently.” Feeling that his answer was somehow insufficient, he added, “But no, frankly, it doesn’t sound normal to me. Answering to Ian’s name doesn’t sound at all normal.”

  Deloise let out a long, theatrical sigh. “I’m so glad you said that. I was feeling kind of guilty for being so creeped out by it. Thanks for letting me vent.”

  She hugged him, and Will couldn’t help smiling. She was such a sweetheart.

  “Hey,” she said, releasing him, “let’s go do something fun.”

  “You got a plan?”

  “Let’s make brownies and take them to Josh in the hospital.”

  Will grinned. “She’ll probably eat them for breakfast tomorrow.”

  Deloise’s jaw dropped and she smacked his arm. “She will! How did you know that?”

  He opened the door to the hallway and then followed Deloise out. “Oh, I’ve learned a thing or two about her.”

  Through a Veil Darkly

  I’ve been getting a ton of e-mails about the mystery illness that strikes sleeping victims. I ignored the first half dozen that suggested the illness had something to do with the trench-coat men, but then I noticed something interesting. The date of the first reported sighting of the TCM is only four days before the first victim fell ill of CSAD (that’s what the CDC is calling it—catatonic sinoatrial dysfunction).

  Then a source—someone I trust fully—got in touch with me to say that he had actually witnessed the eleventh victim, Simon Parish, being attacked by the TCM in-Dream. My source only recognized Parish after seeing him on the local news and learning he was the latest victim of CSAD. My source pointed out that the pink markings around Simon Parish’s mouth and nose align perfectly with the placement of the gas mask the trench-coat man had fitted him with in-Dream.

  I’m starting to think people are on to something.

  Fifteen

  I saw a gate beyond the arch.

  Josh blinked. Ian stood next to the window, his arms crossed and his eyes cloaked by sunglasses. She saw the dawn reflected in the lenses and heard waves splashing outside the cabin.

  She was so glad to see him.

  She untangled her pendant’s chain from around her neck. “I don’t remember letting go of your hand,” she said as she reached for his arm.

  Then she opened her eyes again.

  “Josh?” Ian asked.

  He was still standing next to the window, wearing ironed brown slacks and a sweater, but his sunglasses were gone and the room around them had changed. Wait, Josh thought. We aren’t at the cabin. We’re in the office. She remembered the night before, stumbling home from the hospital on crutches that chewed at her armpits and finding that Kerstel had made up the futon in the office so that Josh wouldn’t have to climb all those stairs to her bedroom.

  “Are you awake?” Ian asked.

  She nodded and then shook her head. It wasn’t Ian—it was Haley standing next to the window, Haley wearing Ian’s green argyle sweater.

  The happiness she had felt dropped down through her body like a weight, leaving behind a terrible sense of loss.

  “Breakfast is ready in the kitchen,” Haley told her. Then he paused before putting one bent knee on the foot of the futon and leaning his weight on it. If he hadn’t hesitated before assuming his brother’s stance, Josh wouldn’t have been sure he was Haley at all.

  “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes,” she said. She wanted him gone, needed a few moments to remind herself who was here—she couldn’t use the word “alive”—and who wasn’t.

  “Do you need a hand getting dressed?” he asked.

  Josh stared at him. Did she need a hand getting dressed?

  “No, that’s all right,” she told him when she could speak again. “I’ll be fine by myself.”

  He shrugged sheepishly. The gesture was reassuring, pure Haley, and she saw a notepad and pen tucked into his left pocket as he turned away.

  “God bless obsessive-compulsive disorders,” she muttered when he was gone, throwing back the covers, but inside she still felt torn up.

  Truthfully, she could have used some help getting dressed. “You can be walking again in a couple of weeks if you just don’t stress the joint,” the doctor had told her, and to prove the point he had encased her leg in a huge metal and Velcro brace that ran from halfway up her thigh down to her ankle. It was a pain, but she already felt better than she had the morning before.

  Of course, the morning before her father had told her that she wasn’t allowed to dream walk until her knee was not only out of its brace but fully rehabbed.

  “How am I going to train Will if we can’t go into the Dream?” Josh had demanded.

  “There are plenty of things to study here in the World,” Lauren had replied. “There’s dream theory, weapons skills, first aid—”

  “But none of that can take the place of real experience, and it could be months before I finish physical therapy.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it won’t be months,” Lauren said. “A month, maybe.”

  That had not reassured Josh.

  The kitchen was a noisy place. Must mean Whim’s home, Josh thought, and smiled. Sure enough, he was flipping pancakes while Kerstel cut strawberries. He hadn’t undergone a dramatic change since he’d been away, which comforted Josh, and his smile when he saw her was warm. He gave her a hug with his long, wiry arms.

  Meanwhile, Deloise was reading the pancake mix’s nutritional information, and Laurentius was on his way out the door. Josh had just sat down at the table with a cup of hot chocolate when Will suddenly appeared, out of breath, in the kitchen doorway. “Am I too late?” he asked.

  “No,” Josh told him, mystified, “we’re still here.” She felt startled to see him at this time of day, and also startled that everyone else was already used to his presence.

  “I meant for breakfast.”

  Whim handed him a plate. “I’m afraid so. This will have to be lunch.”

  “Thank you,” Will said, plopping down at the table. “Good morning, everybody.” He looked down at the plate in front of him. “Who came up with the brilliant idea of putting strawberries in pancakes?”

  Kerstel laughed and smoothed his hair down before going upstairs to shower.

  Whim joined Will and the Weaver girls at the table and wolfed down three glasses of milk, a mug of coffee, and half a cup of butter with his seven pancakes. He had the metabolism of a puppy and an appetite to match; Josh had always suspected he had an extra thyroid hidden somewhere on his thin frame.

  Winsor came down a few minutes before they needed to leave for school, dressed in designer jeans, a button-down poplin shirt, and a men’s wool suit jacket. “You guys ready to go?” she asked, hoisting her leather messenger bag over her shoulder with her good arm.

  Haley stepped uncertainly into the kitchen and held out a slip of paper to Josh. She couldn’t quite look at it, but she pretended to and nodded. Then she jammed it into her pocket.

  “By the way,” he said, with perfect and utter confidence, “you look beautiful this morning.”

  Will talked through the silence that descended on the rest of the room and then caught himself. Haley smiled at Josh, then blushed and retreated from the room with stubby little steps.

  Winsor set her cup of coffee down on the counter and said, “Okay, Whim, tell me.”

  Whim lifted his eyebrows. “Tell you what?”

  “What is up with Haley?”

  “Seriously,” Deloise added.

  Whim shrugged and opened a Tupperware container of trail mix, largely composed of M&M’s and honey-roasted peanuts. “In ten years, have you ever seen Haley without a piece of paper and a pen? I’ve still got notes fro
m back when he wrote with a crayon.”

  “Not the notes,” Winsor said, “the clothes. The amber-scented cologne. The haircut.”

  “Ian’s ring,” Deloise added. “Ian’s car.”

  “The way he’s hit on me twice this morning,” Josh put in.

  Will was wearing the expression that meant he was paying very careful attention to what was going on around him, and Josh was aware that she didn’t really want to talk about this in front of him. But the situation resolved itself when Whim said simply, “Nothing’s going on. Ian left all his stuff to Haley and he’s using it.”

  “You don’t think that’s just a little strange?” Winsor asked, at the same time Will said quietly, “He didn’t inherit Josh.”

  Whim put the trail mix back in the cupboard and rummaged around for something else. “I just got used to it. He’s still Haley.”

  “We have to get going,” Josh pointed out. “We’re going to be late for homeroom.”

  But minutes later, sitting in the backseat of Winsor’s car with her leg propped up across Will’s lap—he insisted he didn’t mind—Josh dug Haley’s note out of her pocket. The page, torn from a steno pad, began to shake in her hand as she read.

  January 25th

  To: J. D. Weaver

  From: H. McKarr

     1. Accident—You

  a. An aboveground swimming pool collapsed on top of you on Sat.

  b. You were treated for bruised cartilage in your right knee, internal bruises, and a lightly twisted neck Sat. night at St. Dymphna’s Hospital.

  c. You were released Mon. night.

     2. Accident—Others

  a. W. Kansas—concussion (released Sun.)

  b. Wi. Avish—broken wrist (treated and released Sat.)

  c. D. Weaver, H. McKarr, and Wh. Avish—unharmed

     3. Continued Treatment

  a. Your knee brace can be removed Fri.

  b. For pain, take Advil as prescribed.

     4. Schoolwork

  a. Make-up work for Mon. will be due on Thurs.

     5. Love