by Kit Alloway
“They were Ian’s,” Whim said.
“Oh, Ian.” She sighed. “I miss that guy.” She poured the Veil dust into the mortar and began crushing it up. To Will, she said, “How’s his widow?”
She meant Josh. “Bayla,” Whim said sternly.
“She’s not his widow,” Will told her.
Bayla smiled, both bashful and coy. “Sorry, I forgot she’s yours now.” She took a bottle of water out of her purse and poured a few drops into the mortar. “This is just sugar water, to bind it. Also, some people don’t like the taste.” She kept grinding away until the dust and water had been mashed into an elementary school–style superthick white paste. “All systems are go.”
“What do I do?” Will asked.
“Just scoop some up on your fingertip and rub it inside your lower lip.”
“Then what?”
She pulled a battered pack of tarot cards out of her purse. “Then I’ll tell your fortune while we wait to get deep.”
They each scooped up a bit of paste about the size of a die—Will took less than the others—and rubbed it inside their lower lips. Aside from sugary, the Veil dust tasted of something Will couldn’t identify—smoke? maple syrup? He rubbed his tongue against his lip, trying to catch enough of the flavor to identify it, but it kept getting away from him.
Bayla pushed aside the mortar and pestle and the bag of Fritos Whim was working on to make room on the coffee table for her cards. “How long does this take to kick in?” Will asked as she shuffled.
“Not long.”
Whim stretched out on the couch with a smile and closed his eyes. Will couldn’t stop sucking on his lip, the way he’d always chewed on his cheeks when the dentist numbed them to fill a cavity.
Bayla let him cut the deck and then she dealt. As she laid out the first card, Will realized that she was using not a tarot deck but some sort of dream-walker oracle system. “Two of Spirals, reversed,” she said, naming the card as she turned it over. “The Two of Spirals is a relationship card, but when reversed it suggests a relationship based more on fantasy than reality. It suggests that you care about Josh more in your head than your heart.”
“What?” Will asked. “I think you’re reading that wrong.”
“Well,” she admitted, “the card might mean that Josh cares more about you in her head than her heart.”
“I’m not the one in her head, either,” Will said, thinking of Josh’s nightmares, but he found himself picking up the card to look more closely at it. Two black spirals were set against a fuchsia background, connected by their tails. Will grew dizzy as he looked at them and tried to follow the lines with his eyes. The spirals appeared to be turning, not in a steady motion but in a pulsating one.
Will put the card down, but the room looked wrong. Or else the room looked fine, but Will felt that he remembered it differently. He expected to see a green sofa on the wall where the TV sat, though he couldn’t imagine why.
“Who’s in her head, then?” Bayla asked.
“What?” Will asked.
“Who’s in Josh’s head if not you?” Her eyebrows twitched suggestively.
Feodor, Will thought, looking back at the card. He had an idea for a painting then—a painting of Josh, Feodor’s face visible within a spiral drawn over her head, Will’s own face cast in the spiral above her heart.
She’s not in love with him, Will thought, afraid to hope the idea might be true. He’s just in her head.
“The Archway,” Bayla said, turning over another card on the coffee table, “means an arrival or departure.”
“That’s not at all vague,” Whim cracked. He leaned over to sniff Will’s shirt, which was weird. “Why do you smell like vodka?”
“Because you’re high. I haven’t had any vodka.” To Bayla, he said, “What kind of arrival or departure?”
“Well, it came right after the Two of Spirals, so it could mean you and Josh splitting up.”
“Are you at all serious,” Will asked, “or just trying to make me feel bad?”
Bayla giggled. Her pupils were the size of shirt buttons. “Sorry, that’s what the cards say.”
Her response only made Will more confident that she was screwing with his head. “Let me see the cards. Don’t you have a book with explanations for these?”
“Let’s turn on some music,” Bayla said, ignoring his question even as she handed him the deck.
Whim turned on the television and fiddled with the remote. “Everybody fond of George G?” he asked. Apparently he was referring to Gershwin, since “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” began playing.
Will examined the Archway card. It depicted a stone archway, not unlike the one downstairs, built in a grassy meadow. The archway appeared empty, but when Will looked closely at a pond in the background, he realized the water’s surface didn’t reflect the archway. The longer he looked, the less certain he was which universe the card depicted.
Deception, he thought. Trickery. That’s what the card really means.
He glanced up at Bayla and Whim, who were dancing in imitation of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The card’s about them, about the people they’re lying to.
Or maybe not. He didn’t believe in this sort of thing, not usually. But his thoughts had started to move in strange directions, making connections he might not have seen otherwise: how Josh had deceived him about her nightmares, how he had deceived her by hiding how much he knew, how Whim deceived Deloise and Bayla deceived Bash, even how Mirren deceived everyone by hiding why she wanted to stop staging.
How Feodor had deceived them all by pretending to die.
No, no, Will thought. He really did die. I saw it.
His gaze had fallen on the green couch, only there was no green couch in the room. If there had been, it would have been sharing the same space as the TV.
Children’s nightmares, he thought. The most unstable of dreams.
He couldn’t exactly see the green couch in front of him, but he could picture it so strongly that it might as well have been in the room. In fact, as he stared at the place where it should have been, two figures appeared, lying with their limbs entwined, their mouths sealed together.
It’s Haley, Will thought, but as the boy’s polo shirt and slacks grew more solid, he realized his mistake. No, it’s Ian. And the girl is Josh.
Her hair was longer—Will had never seen it long, and that, along with a certain softness in her features, made her look younger.
“When’s your mom coming home?” Josh asked.
“Hopefully never,” Ian said, and they laughed between kisses.
Will sat mesmerized by the two ghosts.
“What about Haley?” Josh asked.
“Who cares if he walks in? Let him. He might learn a thing or two to show Winsor.”
Josh frowned in admonishment and Ian grinned.
“I think this really happened,” Will said, not to them but to himself. “The room remembers.”
“You’re starting to get deep,” Bayla told him as Whim dipped her. “Let the dreamfever take you.”
Will brushed his hand through the air, expecting the images to ripple, but his fingers touched the back of Josh’s head, ruffling her silky hair. She and Ian both looked at Will.
“Excuse me, this is a private party,” Ian said, but Josh tried to straighten her clothing.
Will didn’t think she recognized him. Why would she? Until he’d become her apprentice, they had barely spoken two words to each other at school.
He held out the deck of cards, and Josh drew one.
“I can’t protect you from this,” Josh whispered as she stared at the card, and her features aged. The playful smile disappeared and her green eyes appeared paler than ever.
“The thing about Josh,” Ian said, reaching up to wrap his arms around her waist, “is that she doesn’t need a friend, or a therapist, or an apprentice. She needs a man.”
He yanked her down on top of him and the card floated from her hand.
&nbs
p; Will picked it up. The label at the bottom of the card read, “Walker of Stones.” It depicted a man with his pockets turned out, holding a brass scale in one hand. The card had landed upside down, so that the tiny people standing on the scales seemed about to plunge into open air. When Will turned it right-side up, he couldn’t shake the idea that the people were going to be thrown from the scales and that the man holding the beam above them was a puppet master.
Peregrine, Will thought. The Walker of Stones is Peregrine.
He didn’t know if that made sense. Organizing his thoughts was growing more difficult. Feodor is in Josh’s head. Deception. Peregrine.
He tried to sit down, but the chair he lowered himself onto turned out not to exist, and he tumbled onto the carpet. Bayla laughed at him. The chair is from the past, he thought. There used to be a chair here. Or there will be. It’s a future chair.
Instead, he got up and sat on the couch—not the green one, which had disappeared along with its occupants—the regular grayish-brown one he sat on every day. He watched Bayla and Whim dance to “The Man I Love.”
Feodor. Josh’s head. Deception. Peregrine. They all go together somehow.
Whim was a good dancer, and Bayla knew how to let him lead. A cloud of violet smoke enveloped them, like a fairy-charmed cloud, and the tender expression in Whim’s eyes when he looked at Bayla made Will feel like he shouldn’t be watching them.
In her head. Deception. Peregrine.
Bayla smiled, and Whim kissed her briefly, gently, before she turned her face to rest her cheek against his shoulder. As they turned, the light shone on her silver bracelet, creating the illusion that she was holding a silver blade against his neck.
Will sat up. They kept turning, and Whim’s eyes closed, a peaceful expression on his usually animated face.
Bayla drew the Two of Spirals, Will thought. It’s about her and Whim—not me and Josh.
He scrambled to lay the three cards out in order on the coffee table.
Bayla is in Whim’s head. Deception. Peregrine.
He didn’t know if he was hallucinating or not when Bayla lifted a finger to her lips as she rotated past him.
Aretha Franklin came on, singing “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
Bayla is a spy for Peregrine. All this with Whim has been an act.
I can’t protect you from this, Josh had said.
Bayla grinned at him as she and Whim twirled around the room. Her lips pulled back to reveal bloodstained teeth.
“Will!”
Ian was standing in the doorway to Whim’s room—no, it had been Ian’s room once. He beckoned Will with a finger.
Uncertainly, Will gathered up the cards and followed Ian into Whim’s bedroom. Everything inside it was different. All Whim’s crap was gone, replaced by a queen-sized bed that was much too big for the room, a pile of sports equipment, and a shoe rack full of expensive sneakers.
“Check it out,” Ian said, crouching at the foot of the bed. With a fingernail, he pried the metal heat duct cover away from the wall. “Reach inside.”
I’m going to regret this, Will thought, but he couldn’t resist sticking his hand into the wall. A few inches past his wrist, he felt something cold and smooth.
He pulled out a pint of vodka.
“That’s for you,” Ian told him. “I saved it all this time for you.”
Will gazed at the bottle, at an incomprehensible label written in Russian. His hand shook. “I don’t want this,” he told Ian, and he dropped it on the floor before running out of the apartment.
Down he went, past the first floor and straight into the basement, but Ian followed him. Will had been certain Ian couldn’t leave the apartment, yet he could hear the taller boy’s footsteps behind him on the stairs, hear him calling, “It’s cool, man, it’s cool!”
Will fled across the basement, heading for the gun safe, but he tripped on a stray free weight and fell to the floor in front of his desk. When he stood up, Ian was sitting in the chair beside the desk, sipping from the bottle and looking at the timeline of Feodor’s life.
“That’s a pretty sweet stalker wall,” he told Will.
“You can’t be here,” Will said. “You’re dead!”
“That’s the great thing about Veil dust. The past—the present—it all comes together. Maybe I’m dead—maybe you’re dead—maybe we’re alive together in a new life.” Ian held out the bottle. “To Veil dust!”
Only when Will reached for the vodka did he realize he was still holding Bayla’s card deck in his hand. As he set it down on the desk, the top card stuck to his sweaty hand and flipped itself over onto the desk.
The Nine of Moons. A woman climbed a twisting rope ladder into the sky, collecting moons. Four were already tucked in her bag, and another five hung waiting.
Will stared at the card, but all he could think was that the ladder looked like a DNA double helix. It offered no insight to his dilemma. He waited, hoping something would click in his mind, but all he felt was a fine tremble in his bones and increasing anxiety.
Finally, he picked up the Nine of Moons to put it back in the deck, and his eyes fell on the paper beneath it: Mirren’s re-creation of the page from Feodor’s last manuscript.
Will read, “A tangential link between body and consciousness, manipulated by influential magnets, creates the possibility of using fragmentary physical specimens to locate specific souls within the Dream.”
“Fragmentary physical specimens,” Will murmured.
“That means small,” Ian told him.
Will looked at the card, still in his hand.
DNA. It means that anyone with a sample of my DNA can locate my soul within the Dream.
“Who’s got your blood, Mr. Kansas?” a softly accented voice asked.
Ian was gone, and Feodor was sitting in the chair by the desk, the bottle of vodka in his hand. He wore the same neat white shirt and gray vest in which Will had seen him last, and he greeted Will with the same innocuous smile.
Will was so caught off guard by the sight of him that he simply said, “No one has my blood.”
Feodor reached out and picked up the deck of cards, causing Will to stumble backward into a chair. Its metal legs shrieked against the cement floor as it slid across the room.
Feodor didn’t react. He shuffled through the deck and then laid out the three cards Will had drawn earlier: the Two of Spirals, the Archway, the Walker of Stones. At the end of the line, he placed the Nine of Moons.
“Look,” he said, and Will looked, but the only thing he saw were the bloody fingerprints left on each card where Feodor had touched them.
“Oh God,” Will said, backing away even farther.
Blood began to slowly seep out of Feodor’s pores, tiny pinpricks of red expanding and merging until a crimson sheen covered his face and hands. In seconds, the fabric of his shirt went from white to red.
“Stop!” Feodor commanded. “It’s only blood! Pay attention!”
He pointed to the Nine of Moons, and the swift motion of his hand flung blood flying across the desk in thin ropes.
“We have work to do!” Feodor said. “Death is a mere inconvenience!”
Will turned and ran across the basement, knocking over the free-weight rack and nearly getting tangled up in a jump rope along the way. He reached the archroom door and frantically punched in his code, only to see the light turn red instead of green.
“And you wonder why she comes to me at night!” Feodor taunted. “I can give her the World, the Dream, the Death—all of it!”
Will punched his code again, and the light turned green as internal gears unlocked the door. Before it had finished opening fully, Will was through and yanking the door shut again.
“You are a child—”
Will could still hear Feodor screaming on the other side of the door. As he backed away, he heard a different voice: Josh’s.
“Will?” she asked.
He turned around and saw her tied up on the archroom floor.
“What? Of course I am.”
“No,” Will told her, sinking to the floor. “You’re just inside my head.”
He curled up in a ball and ground his face against his knees until his brow bones hurt. “Will,” Josh kept saying. “It’s really me. Are you all right? Can you untie me? I promise I’m real.”
His head hurt. His eyes ached deep within every time he tried to open them. He needed to sleep, but Josh kept talking to him.
“Will, look at me. Please.”
He forced his eyes open against the daggers of light. “What?”
Her face was only a few feet away, a black patch over one eye, but he thought he saw something foreign in her expression, and he wondered if she had come from the future or the past.
“What’s wrong?”
Will closed his eyes again. “I’m deep on Veil dust,” he told her.
Then he took a long swig of vodka from the bottle in his hand and went to sleep.
Twenty−one
Haley found Josh sometime after midnight. By then she had been bound for hours, watching Will sleep and wondering if he’d been serious about the Veil dust. She hoped not.
While she slowly coaxed her stiffened muscles out of the positions to which they had become accustomed, Haley sat on the floor beside Will’s unconscious form and explained how he and Mirren had come home to find Deloise standing on the second-floor balcony and emptying Bayla’s purse onto the lawn below.
“I guess Bayla brought over some Veil dust,” Haley concluded. “And then Deloise got home and found her with Whim.…”
He winced.
“How bad was it?” Josh asked, remembering how she and Haley had once caught their respective loves naked in the forest. Together.
“Bad,” Haley said.
“That’s just skippy,” Josh said, thinking about which punch she’d use on Whim.
They woke Will, but he was too disoriented to make any sense. “The seeker of blood,” he mumbled as Josh helped him to his feet. “The two of blood. The nine of—”
“Blood,” Josh finished in unison with him. “Yeah, we get it.”