Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Finished tidying, Dale leaned into the bedroom doorway. Chris was lying flat on his back, arms thrown out, his breathing rough and deep and regular. Dale looked at him for a few moments, then washed the dishes and let himself out of the apartment, closing the door quietly behind himself, the locks clicking sharply into place.

  “We tried to save you.”

  As the mist creature spoke, other faint voices echoed its words. David could make out other shadowy figures forming in the flickering light from the torch on the floor across the room. He relaxed slightly against the cavern wall.

  “Save me?”

  The creature had taken on a small, shimmering humanlike form. He seemed to be standing in the air next to David. “We tried.”

  David could almost read sadness on his grey, indistinct features.

  “You saw what the Sunstone did, when you touched it,” the voice said. “We tried to stop you.”

  David remembered the shock, how it had made his heart jump in his chest.

  “I thought you were trying to kill me,” he said, still suspicious. “I thought you were one of the tests, the traps set by Gafilair.” The words came so naturally to him now.

  “No, not a test. We’ve seen what the Sunstone can do …” The voice trailed off.

  “We touched it, too,” said another voice, which sounded as boyish as the first, if not younger.

  “We all touched it,” said the first figure. “That’s why we tried to save you.”

  And failed, thought David.

  “The Queen sent all of you as well?”

  The shapes looked to one another again. “Yes and no,” the first voice said.

  “What does that mean?” David asked, starting to lose patience.

  “I’m the only son of Mareigh, who runs The Mermaid’s Rest tavern within the walls of the lower city,” the first voice said. “Captain Bream came for me one morning. I thought I was in trouble for attacking two of my mother’s customers the night before …”

  As the first voice continued speaking, another voice began. “I’m the only son of Mareigh …”

  “But instead I was introduced to the Queen, and her adviser, a magus by the name of Loren …”

  Another voice started to speak. “I am the only son of …”

  “I was told that I was the only one who could save the kingdom,” said the first voice. “That I had been written of in a prophecy …”

  David struggled with the words, trying to figure out some sort of explanation, anything that might help him make sense of this.

  “We were attacked on the road by Berok assassins …”

  David felt himself growing cold.

  “And the morning that we left the inn, the captain called the innkeeper’s wife to him, and said—”

  “Tell your husband he lives by mercy of the King,” David muttered at the same time the mist creature spoke the words.

  The room fell silent as the voices stopped.

  “Yes,” the first voice said quietly.

  “But that’s my story,” David said weakly.

  “That’s the story,” the grey figure said. “That’s the story that brought all of us here. It ends with a flash, and death. It ends with the Sunstone.”

  David had to take a deep breath to hold down the bile he felt rising in his throat. He looked between the grey, misty figures. “But … who are you?” he asked.

  “We’re all that remains,” the first voice said, heavy and slow, “of those who have come before you. Each of us the one and only hero who could save the kingdom.”

  I waited in bed for several minutes after I heard Dale lock the door and walk down the stairs. It was stupid, lying there, faking sleep in case someone checked on me—now I knew how David felt. But this way Dale got to feel like he was looking after me, and I could avoid his skeptical looks about David and his reading.

  In the distance, there was the sound of a van door closing, of an engine starting. I crept from bed and skulked over to the window to peer out. Dale’s van was gone.

  Back at the desk, I tossed the medical books onto the reading chair; the medical stuff was a dead end anyway. Dale had said something near the end of the conversation: “It’s not the book.” He’d been debating a point I hadn’t made, firing a connection that I hadn’t even considered.

  What if something about To the Four Directions itself had caused David’s attacks?

  I flipped slowly through the pages, trying to find the place where the book had fallen open in the hospital room, the place in the story where David had been overcome.

  He didn’t know if the Stone’s powers would protect him, but what other hope did he have?

  Pulling himself to his knees, Dafyd reached out for the Sunstone.

  David had been reading a suspenseful section of a novel that he’d been obsessed with for days, and at the moment that the hero of the story is overcome by unknown forces, rendered unconscious and senseless, David had a seizure that left him unconscious, senseless.

  It was a bit of a stretch, but was it possible that he could identify so deeply with a character in a book that he might physically respond to the injuries that the character suffered? Could his unconsciousness be his way of responding to the trauma suffered by Dafyd in the book?

  The first time I could really recall being that immersed in a book was reading those first Lazarus Took books at my grandmother’s place. Those few weeks when I was eleven, I wasn’t really in Henderson at all—I was taking to the road with the travelling players in The World a Stage, hiding in the woods from the King’s Men in The Road to Honour, trying to find my sword and my destiny in Shining Swords and Steel.

  I remembered vividly the way it had felt when I had to stop to have dinner or to go to bed: the real world seemed a strange and disappointing place, and a pale substitute for the life I was living in the stories.

  I’m sure that I had had similar experiences before then—Lazarus Took probably came to mind because of David’s book—but I couldn’t think of any other books that had taken me quite that deep.

  It made sense to start with Lazarus Took.

  I had just gone to LazarusTook.com when I heard a soft knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs, then the gentle rattling of keys.

  Jacqui.

  “You’re ghosts,” David said in a whisper. “Spirits.”

  The grey figure who had been speaking the most nodded his head. “I guess we are.”

  “Then who … who are you?”

  The spirit looked at him. “The name the book gave me was Matthias. My real name is Matt. Matthew. Matthew Corvin.”

  Matthew Corvin.

  David knew the name, but it took him a moment to place it. “Seattle,” he said excitedly, as the pieces fell into place.

  The shade nodded.

  “You read the book before me. You wrote your name in it!”

  “We all read it before you,” the spirit said. “That’s what brought us here, the same as it brought you.”

  “Brought us here?” He thought of reading the book, the way the letters didn’t move and flip on the page like they usually did when he read. And after a while the words had seemed to disappear altogether: everything had seemed so real, it was like he wasn’t reading at all.

  A coldness crept into David’s belly. “Does that mean …?”

  He looked at the spirits around him, the grey faces that hinted at what they had looked like as children.

  “Does that mean …?” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word, could barely speak at all. “Does that mean I’m a ghost?”

  “No,” Matthew said, his voice uncertain for the first time. “No, you’re something different.”

  “You’re up,” Jacqui said, surprised. She stepped into the apartment and closed the door. “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  “Too much to do,” he said warily. How long had it been since she’d been in his apartment? Months, probably.

  “Did you at least try to get some sleep?”

>   He straightened up in his desk chair slightly, unsure why her mere presence was making him so tense. “I lay down for a bit.”

  Her eyes drifted to the desk, to the books and papers on the chair. The medical references. Her eyes went to the laptop screen, but Chris reached out and closed it, trying to make the gesture look casual.

  “I called the hospital,” she said, and he turned to her. “David’s resting. The sedatives have worn off and he seems calmer.”

  “For the moment,” he muttered.

  She flinched.

  “But what happens when the next seizure hits? And the one after that? How much damage does each of these seizures do to him?”

  She gestured helplessly with her hands. “I don’t know.” “That’s just it—nobody has the first idea what’s wrong with him. He’s supposed to be getting better but he’s not, and nobody knows what’s going on.”

  His eyes darted toward the desk, a glance so quick that Jacqui thought she might have imagined it, especially when he fell back deep into his chair, shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you. I’m just …”

  “I know,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  Neither of them spoke again for several moments.

  “Anyway,” she said finally, carefully. “I came over to leave you a note. I’m going back to the hospital.”

  He stood up. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “Do you mind waiting a couple of minutes? I should probably change my clothes.”

  She tried to smile. “You might want to wash your face and comb your hair while you’re at it.”

  “What would I do without you?”

  She stood up. “I’ll wait for you in the van. Take your time.” Taking the keys from the counter, she started down the stairs.

  Once she was gone, Chris went to the Biography page at LazarusTook.com and pressed Print. He cleaned himself up as three pages dropped into the hopper.

  He folded them into the book and then, before leaving, grabbed a new Moleskine notebook, still in the plastic, out of his top desk drawer.

  “Something different?” David repeated.

  “Look at yourself,” Matthew Corvin’s spirit said.

  Lowering the torch a little, David looked down at himself, drawing a short breath at what he saw.

  Leather boots. Brown pants. The guardsman’s training uniform that Dafyd had been wearing—David understood what it was immediately, though it was different from how he had envisioned it. The fabric was heavier, rougher cut, the boots battered and workmanlike.

  “It’s not what usually happens,” the spirit said, the words seeming to emanate from the mist without any movement now.

  “What usually happens?” David asked.

  “Usually the hero gets to the bottom of the stairs and sees the Sunstone. He hesitates for a moment, then goes toward it. And as he reaches out for it …”

  David flinched, remembering the sudden, heart-stopping jolt. “You died,” he said, trying to think it through.

  “You died too.”

  For a moment, David couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. “What?”

  “The blast blew you partway across the room,” Matt said. “You weren’t breathing. You didn’t have a heartbeat. You died.”

  David looked down at himself again. He didn’t look dead.

  “After touching the Sunstone, our bodies vanished. We’re all that was left,” Matt said. “Your body didn’t disappear. And then you woke up. Back from the dead.”

  David flexed the fingers on his left hand. But not really his hand. This hand, it was bigger than his own, stronger, rougher. This body had spent its childhood working in a tavern, not sitting at a school desk.

  “So why me?” He asked. “What’s different for me?”

  David was “resting quietly” according to the nurse on duty. His eyes were open and moving, his hands twitching and pushing against the leather restraint.

  I leaned over the bed, over his face. “We’re back, sport,” I whispered, kissing him on the forehead.

  David had no reaction, not even the slightest hesitation in the movement of his eyes. He was in his own world.

  I straightened up and looked at Jacqui, shaking my head.

  She smiled a tight, sad smile. “I’ll go check in at the nurses’ station.”

  The waiting was terrible. I could almost hear the drip of the liquid in the IV as each drop pulsed down the clear plastic tube and into my son’s bloodstream. People passed in the hallway in flashing blurs of colour and sound, loud voices echoing off the cold walls and floors. Beds slid past, bodies shrouded, faces pale and yellow in the harsh institutional light. My own breathing was too loud, every motion in the chair echoing in the still air. I tried to read David’s book, but the words swam off the page.

  The only thing I could focus on was David’s face: the smoothness of his cheeks, the pale length of his eyelashes, the slackness of his mouth.

  When Jacqui returned, I stood up.

  “I was thinking of getting something in the cafeteria,” I said.

  “And having a cigarette.” She smiled.

  “And having a cigarette.”

  I took David’s book with me, double-checking with my thumb for the pages I’d tucked inside.

  “I’m not sure what’s different for you,” Matthew said. “We didn’t save you, David. You still touched the Sunstone. You still died.”

  “Then why … How is it I’m still alive?”

  “Something is keeping you alive,” Matt said. “Something is keeping your story going.”

  Something about the way Matt said “story” made David think of his father, the way he would keep reading even after David closed his eyes.

  David felt his knees weaken at the thought of his father, and he wished desperately for someplace to sit down, other than the cold wet floor.

  He understood.

  “You were reading the book yourself, right?”

  “Right,” Matt said slowly. “What—?”

  “I’m not stupid, okay?” David said, more forcefully than he felt. “But I’ve got a problem reading. So every night …” He slowed down. “My dad reads to me. Like a … a bedtime story.”

  He braced himself for Matt’s reaction.

  Instead, Matt said, “That’s cool.”

  David had no idea how to react.

  “What if … What if my dad’s still reading to me? That would keep the story going, right? When you … when you touched the Sunstone, here, you stopped reading there, in the real world. But if my dad is still reading the story to me …”

  I sat down as far from the cafeteria doors as I could manage. This early, the room was almost empty. It was mostly doctors and nurses, talking loudly and laughing. Others, “civilians,” as Jacqui called them, sat quietly alone or in twos, staring into their food or talking in hushed tones. Their faces were tight and pale, a palpable anguish just below the surface. They looked broken, beaten.

  Like me.

  I finished a bowl of oatmeal and unfolded the pages that I had tucked into the back of To the Four Directions.

  Reading the biography carefully, making notes, I suspected that there wasn’t much point. Just the life of a writer that nobody remembered. What in this essay, this list of dates and acquaintances, moves and publishers, could possibly help David? What difference did it make when Lazarus Took was born, where he lived, when he died? It was all just trivia.

  Or was it?

  I flipped back through my notes. There, barely legible in my own handwriting: Died suddenly, Seaside, Oregon, Sept 14, 1950.

  I flipped to the copyright page of To the Four Directions.

  “Alexander Press, 1951.”

  It was probably nothing: books got published after their authors’ death all the time. Hell, V.C. Andrews and Robert Ludlum have made second careers out of it. The publication had probably been scheduled already when Took died, and the publisher fulfilled the c
ontract. It was probably nothing.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d caught someone in a lie.

  David thought of the book, the pride on his father’s face as he had handed him the birthday gift, the sound of his father’s voice as he read, the feel of the book in his hands as he read the words for himself.

  “The book’s not finished,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Matt asked him.

  “To the Four Directions. This part, in this chamber, with the Sunstone. That’s only, I don’t know, not even halfway through. There has to be a mistake.”

  Matt’s features condensed enough to look quizzically at David.

  “You don’t kill off the main character halfway through.”

  The look remained on Matt’s face.

  “My dad, he’s a writer,” David tried to explain. “We talk about this stuff sometimes. A writer wouldn’t just kill off the main character halfway through the book. Nobody would read any further. He’d end up having to start again and again with a new …” Looking around at the shades, gathered in a loose knot around him, David saw that his point seemed to make sense.

  “So we shouldn’t have died here,” Matt said slowly.

  “Exactly,” David said.

  “That means—”

  “The story doesn’t end here. It goes on. It has to.”

  David turned toward the Sunstone, the ruby glimmering like a spot of wet blood on the wall.

  “You look like you’re feeling a little better,” Jacqui said when I came back that evening. She was sitting in the chair by the bed, reading a copy of Maclean’s she had probably purloined from the nurse’s station. “Did you sleep?”

  “A bit,” I lied, setting the book on the bed at David’s feet. “How’s he doing?”