In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  Katherine said nothing.

  “Up, please, Katherine. It’s time for you to go.”

  Knowing when she was beaten, Katherine slouched to her feet, tucking her book into her bag, and started for the door. Miss Hansard sighed as she watched her go. Katherine really was an excellent student. A little reserved, and a little overly fond of looking for loopholes, but still, an excellent student.

  “Katherine,” she called.

  “Yes, Miss Hansard?”

  “You were a joy to teach. Whoever has that opportunity next year will be very lucky.”

  Katherine seemed to mull her words over for a while, considering them from every angle. Then she smiled. “Thank you, Miss Hansard,” she said, and slipped out, leaving the classroom suddenly, echoingly empty.

  Miss Hansard, who had been teaching for nearly twenty years, slumped against her desk and wondered when retirement had gone from a distant impossibility to something to be devoutly yearned for. They got younger every year. She was certain of that much, at least. They got younger, and harder to understand, every single year.

  * * *

  THE OTHER STUDENTS were gone, whirling off into the dawning summer like dandelion seeds in the wind. Katherine looked mournfully back at the classroom once before she started walking away. It would have been nice to spend a little longer at her desk, reading where no one knew how to find her. As soon as she got home, her mother would probably try to pass Diana off to her for “just a few minutes, be a good girl now and help your mother,” and that would mean playing babysitter for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t particularly want to go outside and run around playing the sort of games that weren’t safe for toddlers, but she didn’t want to be stuck keeping Diana from eating thumbtacks, either.

  Daniel never had to babysit. Daniel could have spent all day, every day reading in his room if he’d wanted to, and their parents would have been right there to applaud and tell him how amazing he was for being so serious about his studies. They didn’t discourage her, exactly, didn’t tell her she wasn’t supposed to read because she was a girl or that she needed to be better at her chores, but there was always a vague impression that they expected something different from her, and she didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t want to know what to do with that. She suspected it would involve changing everything about who she was, and she liked who she was. It was familiar.

  Dwelling on what would happen when she got home made her uncomfortable. She took her book back out of her bag and began to read, following Trixie Belden and her friends into another mystery. Mysteries in books were the best kind. The real world was absolutely full of boring mysteries, questions that never got answered and lost things that never got found. That wasn’t allowed, in books. In books, mysteries were always interesting and exciting, packed with daring and danger, and in the end, the good guys found the clues and the bad guys got their comeuppance. Best of all, nothing was ever lost forever. If something mattered enough for the author to write it down, it would come back before the last page was turned. It would always come back.

  Katherine had made the walk home from school hundreds of times, tagging at her brother’s heels when she was in kindergarten, forging her own trail in first grade, and now following it with the faithful devotion of one who knows the way. She didn’t look up as she walked, allowing her feet to remember where they needed to fall if she was going to be home before dark.

  It is an interesting thing, to trust one’s feet. The heart may yearn for adventure while the head thinks sensibly of home, but the feet are a mixture of the two, dipping first one way and then the other. Katherine’s feet were as sensible as the rest of her, trained into obedience by day after day of walking the same path, following the same commands. They knew where to go, and needed no input from her eyes. So it was truly an act of unthinkable rebellion when, at the corner of Pine and Sycamore, her feet—acting entirely on their own—turned left instead of right.

  At first Katherine, deeply engrossed in her book and trusting in the inalienability of routine, didn’t notice the deviation. She continued walking as the familiar streets dropped farther and farther behind her, replaced first by the shabby neighborhood which bordered the creek, and then by an old walking trail that wound its way through a field of blackberry brambles. It was only when a shadow fell across her book, rendering it temporarily impossible to read, that she stopped and looked up, blinking at the unexpected absence of light.

  In front of her, growing right in the middle of the path, was a tree.

  Now, while this path was not a customary part of her journey home—was, in fact, some distance from any route she should have been taking—she had walked on it before, picking blackberries in the summer or using it as a shortcut to the local library. And there had never, on any of her journeys, been a tree there.

  Katherine looked at the tree. The tree, so far as she could know or tell, did not look back, having no eyes to speak of. It was a good tree, the kind with branches that begged to be climbed and bark that should have been scarred with a dozen sets of initials, summer romances preserved for eternity in the body of a living thing. Its trunk was not a straight upward progression, but rather a long meander, a crooked line stretching from root to crown. She could not have closed her arms around it had she tried. Three girls her size couldn’t have accomplished that particular feat.

  Its branches, which were thick and dense enough to block a remarkable amount of sunlight, were covered in leaves spanning the entire spectrum of green, from a pale shade that verged on soapy white all the way to a color that stopped barely shy of black. None of them seemed to be quite the same shape as its neighbors. It was a patchwork, an impossible thing. Katherine took a step back.

  “What kind of tree are you?” she asked—for, as a child who spent the greatest part of her time in comfortable, unchallenging solitude, she had never quite lost the habit of speaking to herself when there was no one else around to talk to.

  Had the tree responded with words, this would have been a very brief tale. Katherine, being a sensible girl, would have screamed and run for home, and never again allowed her feet to follow an uncharted trail into the fringes of mystery. She would have grown up stolid and silent, and found the husband she had once believed the world would conjure for her, and become the librarian she had always wanted to be. Her own children might have been more adventurous in their day, for it sometimes seems as if adventure can skip a generation, choosing to remain unpredictable and hence unchained.

  Yes, had the tree responded with words, we would be finished now, and all the things which are set to follow would never have come to pass. Perhaps that would, in a way, have been the kinder outcome. Perhaps it would have spared a few broken hearts, a few shattered dreams. But the tree, which had been asked that same question before, did not reply aloud. Instead, the trunk twisted, like a washcloth being slowly wrung dry by an unseen hand, and a door worked its way into view while Katherine stared with wide and disbelieving eyes.

  Her book fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers, landing in the dust of the trail. This will be important later.

  The door in the tree was neither large nor ornate, but barely big enough for a child of her size to climb through, should she choose to do so. The hinges, the frame, even the doorknob, all were made of wood, stripped of its bark and gleaming pale as bone in the thin summer sunlight which filtered down through the branches. At the center of the door, exactly where her eyeline fell, someone had carved a square made of branches and vines, blackberry for the bottom, grape for the sides, and pomegranate for the top. All of them dripped with heavy, wooden fruit, at once crude and so realistically rendered that her mouth watered with a sudden, inexplicable hunger.

  Inside the square, surrounded by fruit and contained by the graven border, were two words:

  BE SURE.

  “Be sure of what?” asked Katherine, who would have run had the tree chosen to speak, but who was still a child, after all, and an imaginative,
remarkable child beside. The movement of the tree had not startled her as it would have an adult. The world was filled with things she did not quite understand, and she knew that plants could move: the progress of the zucchini across her mother’s garden proved that. So who was to say that a tree might not move, if given the right motivation?

  That she should be the right motivation was flattering, in a deep-down, inexplicable way. She had never really considered herself to be worth that sort of attention.

  The tree didn’t move again. The door didn’t open. It remained exactly as it was, tantalizing and strange, with those two little words—be sure? Be sure of what? She was sure of her skin, of her self, of her name, but somehow she didn’t think that was what the tree intended—hanging in front of her eyes, an unanswered question that contained absolutely everything.

  Katherine took a step forward, one hand reaching thoughtlessly outward, until her outstretched fingertips were barely an inch from the wood. The carved fruits seemed to shimmer, like they had been coated in a thin layer of dew. She wanted to touch them more than she wanted anything else in the world … and so she did, brushing her hand across the image, feeling the soft warmth left by the summer sun. The shimmer remained, but the wood itself was dry as a bone.

  Again, had she been older, Katherine might have seen this for a warning. Wood does not customarily glitter. Few things do, unless they are attempting to lure something closer to themselves. Sparkle and shine are pleasures reserved for predators, who can afford the risk of courting attention. The exceptions—which exist, for all things must have exceptions—are almost entirely poisonous, and will sicken whatever they lure. So even the exception feeds into the rule, which states that a bright, shimmering thing is almost certainly looking to be seen, and that which hopes to be seen is pursuing its own agenda.

  The doorknob turned, entirely on its own. Not all the way, not enough to undo a latch or open a door, but … it turned all the same, a little half-twist that drew Katherine’s eyes away from the carving and down toward the motion. If the doorknob could turn, it wasn’t locked, she realized.

  The door could be opened.

  No sooner had the thought formed than it became the most important thing she had ever considered. The door, the mysterious door with its mysterious admonition, could be opened. She could open it, and see what was on the other side. Why, perhaps she could even meet the person who had instructed her to be sure, and tell them that she was Katherine Lundy, she was always sure, no matter what. Hadn’t she survived four whole years of school without any friends? Couldn’t she read faster than anyone else she knew? She was always sure.

  The only thing she wasn’t sure of was why she was hesitating. She looked at the words again, etched deep into the wood. This was no pocketknife carving, done by one of the tough teenagers from the high school on the other side of town. This was beautiful. Her mother would have been happy to hang something that beautiful in the hall, and her father wouldn’t have sniffed when he saw it, rejecting it as a childish art project. This was real, in a hard-edged, intangible way she didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate, but understood all the same.

  Be sure. She only had one chance to decide whether or not she was. She knew that. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew all the same.

  “I am sure,” she said, and grasped the knob. It spun in her hand, eager to fulfill its purpose, and the door swung open, soft white light flooding out into the shadows beneath the tree. Katherine stepped through. The door slammed shut behind her.

  For a moment, everything on the trail remained the same. Then, like a patch of dust being broken up by the wind, the tree began to fade away, turning golden as the sunlight that lanced through its now-insubstantial branches. The solid wood dissolved into tiny dancing motes of light, until those too were gone, and only the ordinary, unblocked trail remained.

  The trail, and Trixie Belden and the Black Jacket Mystery, which had fallen facedown in the dirt, forgotten in the face of a greater mystery.

  It would be several hours before the Lundys realized Katherine wasn’t holed up in her room, reading and hoping to avoid her chores. It would be another hour after that before Daniel returned from his survey of her usual hiding spots—the creek, the trees behind the school, the swing set at the local park—and reported that she was nowhere to be found. The police would be called, the town would be alerted, and sometime after that, the book would be found, opened, identified as hers. The search would begin.

  But not yet. Here and now, there was only the trail, the book, and the absence of the tree.

  Everything else would come later.

  3 RULES ARE RULES, NO EXCEPTIONS, NO APPEAL

  KATHERINE STEPPED THROUGH the impossible door into the tree and found herself in a long, curving hallway that looked as if it had been carved from a single piece of wood. There were no corners where the walls met the floor or ceiling: instead, a soft curve helped each blend into the next, smoothly wiping away all distinctions. Everything was golden and pale, polished to a gleaming sheen and striated with the wavy lines she had seen in other pieces of cut wood.

  A long rug patterned in a beautiful blend of grapevines and blackberry creepers stretched from where she stood into the unseen distance, keeping her feet from slipping on the slick floor. It was softly worn, as if many feet had walked on it before she came.

  Her eyes widened. This was someone’s house. It had to be. Hallways and rugs weren’t the sort of things one found inside trees; they belonged in houses, where they were loved and cleaned and cared for by the people who owned them. Which meant she was trespassing. And trespassing was against the rules.

  Katherine understood rules. Understood them down to the marrow of her bones. Rules were the reason the world could work at all. Following the rules didn’t make you a good person, just like breaking them didn’t make you a bad one, but it could make you an invisible person, and invisible people got to do as they liked. She never, never broke the rules if there was any way to avoid it, and when she did break them—say, by trespassing in a stranger’s house just because that stranger happened to live inside a tree—she stopped as quickly as she could.

  She whirled and reached for the doorknob, intending to let herself out before anyone had time to realize she was there … only the door was gone, replaced by more hallway, stretching out for what felt like forever. Katherine froze.

  Trees didn’t suddenly appear where they hadn’t been before. People didn’t make their houses entirely out of a single piece of wood. Doors didn’t disappear as soon as they were used. The number of things that didn’t happen but were happening anyway seemed to be piling up, and up, and up, until it felt like they should be scraping against the sky.

  For maybe the first time since her sixth birthday, when she had decided she didn’t need anyone who didn’t need her, Katherine was unsure.

  This did not make the door reappear.

  “Oh,” she said softly. The hallway swallowed the sound, making it something small and meek and forgettable. She didn’t like that, and so she said again, “Oh,” louder this time, trying to sound surprised, like she had no idea how she had come to be in this place where she wasn’t supposed to be, where she couldn’t possibly be, since there wasn’t any door.

  No one came to ask her why she was in their hallway, or show her the way out. Katherine frowned. This was going to take a little more effort than simple surprise.

  The door wasn’t there: more hallway was. Walking that way should have been impossible, meaning it was against the rules in some intangible, difficult-to-articulate way. Katherine turned again, until she was facing the way she had been originally. Despite having no visible lights at all, the hall was quite well lit, as bright as her bedroom when she plugged her nightlight in. She could almost have read a book without—

  Her hand clenched. Her book was gone. She dimly remembered dropping it when confronted with the impossible tree. She didn’t remember picking it up again. Her frown became a scowl. Book
s were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn’t treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her. Leaving them lying in the dirt while she ran off to impossible places certainly didn’t count as treating them well.

  Nothing to be done about it now, except for getting out of here as soon as she could. She took a step forward before glancing back over her shoulder. The door did not take her movement as a reason to reappear. Sighing, Katherine looked resolutely down the hall and started walking.

  Like the tree trunk, the hall was not perfectly straight: it bent and twisted, slowly, by degrees, until she could have been walking in a circle without properly realizing it. The light grew brighter as she walked, going from nightlight to hallway light to proper overhead light. This, she could read by.

  No sooner had the thought formed than the first of the frames appeared on the wall. It contained a cross-stitch, neatly done, with an embroidered marigold in one corner. Katherine stopped.

  “‘Rule one,’” she read. “‘Ask for nothing.’ How funny that is! Although maybe that means I’m not allowed to ask for the way out? I’ve never heard of a rule like that before.”

  She resumed walking, and shortly came upon a second frame. Again, she stopped.

  “‘Rule two,’” she read. “‘Names have power.’ What does that even mean?”

  The walls did not reply. Katherine walked on, faster now, hurrying to find the next sign.

  Rule three was “always give fair value.” Rule four was “take what is offered and be grateful.” And rule five, most puzzling of all, was, “remember the curfew.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” she complained, and heard a soft click, as of a door latch coming open. She turned. There, on the hallway wall, which she was sure had been smooth and featureless only a moment before, was a door. It was standing ajar, tempting her to come and see what might be waiting on the other side. She bit her lip, lightly, staring at it.