Search for the Shadow Key

by Wayne Thomas Batson

  “We should leave, right?” Amy asked, breaking Archer’s trance. “We need to go . . . before they come back.”

  Archer craned his neck to see the windows on the east side of his home. There was a pink glow in the woods outside. “I think we’re okay for now,” he said. “The sun will be up soon, and I don’t feel that weird cold.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re right. It feels . . . normal.”

  “I still want to see what’s in the basement,” Archer said. “Especially now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Scath tried to take you,” he said. “But they were already here. They put their ice touch on the basement door, and they attacked as soon as I touched the knob.”

  “So?”

  “So, whatever’s in the basement, I don’t think they want me to find it.”

  DREAMTREADER’S CREED, CONCEPTUS 10

  Dreamtreader, you must always know upon what you stand. Yours is not a casual employment, not a trade, not an occupation. Dreamtreading is a high calling and a vital one.

  The Waking World must dream or it will languish in despair that there is nothing more, wilting until there is little left but a dead husk. But the Waking World must not be mistaken for Dream, for that kind of vision without conscience, without wisdom, would be chaos.

  Should you and your Dreamtreader brethren fail, doom will come to both Dream and Walking realms. People will sleep with no dreams and rise with no waking. It will be as carnal and miserable as a nest of eaglets left to starve. They will turn and consume each other. Some will fly too soon and die in the effort. Others, too late, and they will wither.

  Do not let it be so on your watch, Dreamtreader. Not on your watch. For the shattered glass might be glued back together, but it can never be unbroken.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE DEEPEST WELLS

  U couldn’t wait until morning? KARA TEXTED, GLARING AT her glowing smartphone.

  No, came Rigby’s reply. As u know, many things can happen at night.

  What’s so urgent?

  We need to plan a dinner.

  What? R U KIDDING?

  No.

  Kara knew Rigby’s odd sense of humor, but texting at five a.m. about a dinner? That was bizarre, even for him.

  A special dinner, Rigby texted. In the Dream.

  I don’t get it.

  We need to lay things out for Keaton and his DT friend. They need to see we’ve got this.

  Why rub it in? Kara asked. Why play with fire?

  There was a long pause before Rigby texted back, You don’t think this is wise?

  It was Kara’s turn to pause. She had to tread carefully here.

  Whatever U want, Rigby, she texted. What’s the plan?

  After a diabolically long wait, Rigby’s text came. It was so long that her phone broke the message into six segments.

  A creeping chill trickled down Kara’s back after she read it. And, not for the first time, Kara wondered if Rigby truly was insane.

  The lightning was relentless.

  Kaylie stood on the edge and stared down into the inferno of that tempest in the midst of Xander’s Fortune. “I’d rather find a needle in a haystack any day,” Kaylie muttered, thinking that, at least haystacks didn’t usually take you apart cell by cell until you were nothing.

  Between the caustic electrical discharges, the rising vapors, and the blinding light, Kaylie couldn’t see. She willed up a set of headgear she’d read about in one of Archer’s steampunk adventure novels. It fit less than snugly over her head, so she tucked her pigtails up and under. Several sets of geared lenses clicked and clacked into place. She worked at the dials and levers until she got the shade and magnification she wanted. And then she leaped over the edge.

  With Amy on his heels, Archer eased down the stairs. His basement was rectangular, with one L-shaped half being finished, furnished, and comfortable. The other half? Not so much.

  Archer turned on a pair of lamps and took a look around. “Yup,” he said with a sigh. “It’s my basement.”

  “Nothing different?”

  “Not that I can tell,” he said. “I was just down here less than a week ago. It looks the same to me.”

  Amy frowned. “Think about it,” she said. “Your leader, Master Gabriel, did he give you any hint at all?”

  “ ‘You’ll know it when you find it,’ was all he said.” Archer shook his head slowly. The Scath attack and the sudden use of power in the Waking World had caused a surge of adrenaline, but it was wearing off. The realities fell back into place like dark curtains. Rigby, Kara, Dream Inc., his father, Kaylie . . .

  “Some kind of message, maybe?” Amy asked, tapping the space bar on the computer. It didn’t wake. “Think detail. What about these paintings? They look kind of strange.”

  “We’ve always had those,” Archer said, looking at the oriental prints. “My dad got them from my granddad, who was in the Korean War. They are kind of weird.”

  “Should we open stuff? Drawers? The little fridge behind the counter?”

  “I feel like it should be something more obvious, but I’m not seeing it.”

  “What about in there?” Amy asked, pointing to the paneled door on the other side of the desk.

  “Nah,” Archer said. “It’s just my dad’s shop. He hasn’t used it in years, not since Mom . . .”

  “Right.” Amy put her hands on her hips. “Still, it is part of the basement. We should at least look.”

  Archer shrugged. That single bad memory of the basement work side came knocking, but he wasn’t about to give that mental airtime now. He knew Amy was right. At least they had to check, a brief look around. Whatever, Archer thought. This night’s been more trouble than it was worth.

  Reluctantly, he opened the work-side door. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get this over with—”

  Archer smelled it before he saw it. It was pitch dark on the work side, but the scent was unmistakable: fresh cedar wood. That rich, earthy smell filled Archer with more joy than a thousand trophies because he hadn’t smelled it—not in the basement—in a long, long time.

  Archer flipped the light switch and might have gasped but couldn’t catch enough breath to do so. He hadn’t been in the work side of the basement for a while, maybe more than a month. But the last time he’d been in there, the room was just as it had been for many years: abandoned, piles of mismatched pieces of scrap wood, work tables built from sawhorses or old kitchen counters, tools everywhere—the few still hanging up were so shrouded in cobwebs it’d been near impossible to identify which tool was which. It was a junk room, a place for discards and forgotten things. It had become a graveyard for hope.

  But now, the wonderful scent of cedar filled the air once more. The scrap wood had been organized, the tools too, a few new ones shining up their ranks.

  “Oh!” Amy said, gasping loud enough for the both of them. “Oh . . . my . . . word, Archer! Who did this?”

  He didn’t bother swiping the tear on his cheek. “I . . . I think my dad did.”

  Archer and Amy stepped lightly, silently, as if the room were too sacred now to disturb. On every work bench and table, crafted with intricate detail, mostly from cedar but a little balsa and fir also, rested an assortment of wooden wishing wells.

  “I . . . I can’t believe it,” Archer said. “Dad is woodworking again. He hasn’t touched this stuff since Mom died.”

  “Oh,” Amy said. “You mean that night . . .”

  Archer nodded and looked away. “You know how much my mom loved our well in the backyard? Well, when Mom first got sick, Dad started making these little wooden wells. He made them for her, just to cheer her up because she couldn’t walk to see it anymore. They were so good that she made him sell a few, but he still made more. It was something he could do to make Mom smile.

  “But, when she died, Dad came down here and flew into a rage. He wrecked the room and destroyed every last wishing well. I never saw him set foot in the work side after.”r />
  “He’s making the wishing wells again,” Amy said. “That’s gotta be a good thing, yep?”

  “It’s miraculous is what it is, Amy. It means there’s a spark of real life still left in him. Now I know why Master Gabriel wanted me to come back here. He wanted me to see . . . wanted me to know.”

  “Know what?”

  Archer leaned over one of the wishing wells and inhaled deeply. “That broken things—even people—can be rebuilt.”

  Flying was tricky for most Dreamtreaders, and exhausting too. But Kaylie had more mental energy to spend than most and managed to fly like a hawk on her first try.

  Even still, flying back and forth across the guts of an active volcanic crater was no small feat. Kaylie rode thermals, lifts of warm air, whenever she could see them first, but others buffeted her unexpectedly, slamming her against the stone innards of the crater or throwing her dangerously off course.

  Worse yet, the crater vomited up energy discharges, randomly and without warning. Kaylie’s quick thinking saved her more than once, calling up shield after shield of plated steel to bear the brunt of the violent discharges.

  She leaped from ledge to ledge, careening across the violent gulf dozens of times but still coming up empty. “Where are you, stupid key?” she growled. While not perilously low, her will was weakening. The flight, the dodging, the conjuring—it all took its toll.

  Kaylie sought a moment’s respite on a thin jagged ledge that curled about fifteen feet on the interior. She landed, pressed her back flat against the stone, and panted. Suddenly, the right lens on Kaylie’s headgear system fell into place. It was a magnetic filter of some kind, allowing Kaylie’s eyepiece to pierce the vapor for just a moment. It was long enough to see the most foreign thing: a black object on a very low ledge. It wasn’t really a ledge, though, but rather, a small crop of stone, and it wasn’t nearly far enough from the violent miasma below. Kaylie had the will. She could get to it, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be annihilated by a discharge on the way.

  “I need that key,” she growled, taking flight once more. She dove, let herself plummet twenty feet, and then swooped up to take a more gradual descending route to the key.

  Several things happened at once. Kaylie saw through her lenses that a great bubble of electrical energy had risen below her and was growing rapidly. She called up a shield, but didn’t have a chance against the bolt of lightning that spidered down into the crater. It struck the metal, with the shock of impact blowing Kaylie off course.

  She crashed into the ledge and started to fall. She scrabbled for a handhold, knocked stones and dust free, and then struck something else. The Shadow Key spun on the stone and teetered at the edge.

  Kaylie held on for dear life and almost got herself all the way onto the ledge, when the electrical bubble below . . . burst.

  Archer and Amy’s eventful early morning became even more eventful when school beckoned. The two of them raced around the Pitsitakas’ home, grabbing up books, lunch money, backpacks, and an assortment of key disk hard drives.

  Mrs. Pitsitakas entered into the morning chaos and said, “Amy, I got your note.”

  Archer froze, and that was a little awkward because his arm was shoved into his backpack up to his shoulder.

  “I trust whatever you were doing at Archer’s house was good, right, and noble?” Mrs. Pitsitakas asked gently.

  “It was, Mom,” Amy said, pecking a quick kiss on her mother’s cheek. She zipped and slung her backpack. Archer finally moved and did the same.

  “All the same,” Mrs. Pitsitakas said, “your decision made for a short night of sleep. Are you sure going to school today is wise?”

  Archer had the distinct impression that he and Amy were being measured somehow. Mrs. Pitsitakas’ eyes hovered lightly on him and then Amy, slowly meandering back and forth between them. Archer was dead tired, and here Mrs. Pitsitakas was giving them a perfect out from school. But again, there seemed a kind of measurement involved. It was as if he were standing on the Great Scale of Justice. His decision now would change the balance one way or the other.

  “I think we should go,” Archer said quietly. “The extra rest would be nice, but we made the choice to sacrifice sleep. We’ve got to live up to the other side of that choice.”

  Mrs. Pitsitakas’ smile was so subtle that Archer barely caught it. Just a tiny impish upturn in one corner of her mouth—that was it. But it was enough. Archer felt certain he’d given the correct response.

  “I have returned,” Kaylie said. At a table deep within the Lurker’s study, she found her master feasting on a platter of succulent morsels, strange steaming shapes—some recognizable, some not. Kaylie felt her stomach roil. “I almost didn’t make it, Lord Lurker, but here I am.”

  He glanced down at her and sucked the last bit of meat and sinew from a large bone that looked like some small creature’s rib cage. Then he said, “Darling Kaylie, you don’t have to call me Lord or any such thing. And certainly not Lurker. I despise that name. I know! Why don’t you call me Uncle Scovy?”

  “Very well,” she said. “Uncle Scovy, I have brought you a gift.”

  The Lurker let the chicken bone fall from his fingers and snatched up a cloth to wipe his hands. “Oh, I hoped you would!” he said, spinning in his chair. “When my wraithlings returned and reported your doings, I had such confidence that you’d succeed. Oh, oh, oh . . . is this what I think it is?”

  Kaylie nodded and smiled. She held out a very large, dark key. “It’s exactly what you think it is.”

  In spite of the rightness of his decision, Archer was weary and fighting off sleep all through the morning. Doing a lab in Biology helped a little. He was up and around and had the ever-cheery Amy to keep him awake. But later, in Literature and Composition, Archer was struggling. It wasn’t the teacher: Mrs. Mangum had a way of making most lessons fun. It wasn’t the assignment: unlike most of the tenth graders in the advanced class, Archer actually liked writing essays. For him, it was just practice learning to think and communicate, to argue more effectively.

  But the book? The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain? That was another matter. The Tudor-era English was tough to translate when he was fully focused and awake. “Thou speakest well; thou hast an easy grace in it. Art learned?” Twain’s tale was brilliant and accurate in the telling, but not very easy on the sleepy mind.

  Archer found himself nodding. Time passed, and the class moved from activity to activity with Archer scarcely noticing. Until Mrs. Mangum called his name.

  “Archer Keaton,” she said. “What . . . are you doing? Are you falling asleep in my class?”

  Archer sat bolt upright and blinked. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mangum,” he said. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. I—”

  “Of course you didn’t, you absurd loser.”

  Archer blinked. Mrs. Mangum was glaring at him. Her lips were moving, but in a kind of dreamy slow motion, and her voice was no longer her own. It was Rigby Thames.

  “That’s right, Keaton,” Rigby spoke through the teacher’s lips, “I’m talking to you. Have I got your attention?”

  Archer’s head turned as if on a swivel. No one else in the class had changed expression. They gave no sign of anything unusual happening. Unbelievable, Archer thought. Watching and hearing this wonderful woman, his favorite English teacher, speak with a teenage boy’s deep voice was just . . . creepy.

  “Don’t worry, Keaton,” Rigby said. “Only you can hear me. We’re gaining some pretty incredible abilities in the Waking World. Have you noticed?”

  Archer nodded. He was half-tempted to will up an Atomic Foot Stomp and see how Rigby liked it. “What do you want, Rigby?” he asked instead.

  “It’s not so much what I want,” he said. “A rational mind looks beyond emotions and petty lusts. I’ve been thinking that we’re going about this all wrong. I’ve made it too personal. And we’ve got to fix things. You should have your family back. I want you to have your family back. We need to talk.”<
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  Archer squinted and looked again at the other students.

  “No, not here,” Rigby said, the look on Mrs. Mangum’s face completely different from his words. “And not just us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This needs to be decision by committee,” the Rigby-voiced Mrs. Mangum said. “Kara, my Uncle Scovy, Bezeal, you, and Nick Bushwhacker, or whatever his name is. Bring your Master Gabriel, if you want, not that I’d expect him to come. Seems like the Masters don’t like to get their hands dirty these days.”

  “Why should I trust you?” Archer asked.

  “Really? That’s all you’ve got in this dramatic moment? ‘Why should I trust you’? I’d ’ave expected something less clichéd. Point is, you can’t trust me, but you don’t ’ave a lot of choice in this. Therefore, Keaton, you are hereby cordially invited to a grand dinner. Sleep at eleven, the party’s one hour past, at Number 6 Rue de la Morte. RSVP now or someone might just suffer.”

  Archer didn’t hesitate. “We’ll be there.”

  “Good,” Rigby said, and the voice changed back to Mrs. Mangum’s voice in mid-syllable. “Mr. Keaton, please read the passage now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said, noting that half the class was staring at him like he was wearing a flowerpot on his head. “Uh . . . uh, what was the passage . . . again?”

  Mrs. Mangum sighed. “We’re talking about Twain’s tendency to use irony and metaphor together. Page seventy-seven, Miles Hendon’s speech at the top.”

  Naturally, Archer was on the wrong page. He madly flipped through the book until he came to the right spot. He scanned the words at the top of the page, not really registering what they meant. “Okay,” Archer said, “I’ve got it.” He began to read from Twain’s tale: “ ‘After a little, he went on, ‘And so I am become a Knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows! A most odd and strange position, truly, for one so matter-of-fact as I. I will not laugh . . .’ ”