River of Dreams

by Jan Nash

  “I don’t know why Noah’s sick.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Nana. Why is Noah in a coma?”

  “I don’t know.” Nana took a deep breath, used it to steady herself. Finn realized her grandmother was scared. “But now … Rafe thinks Noah’s reaching out to you for help. He thinks you’re a Dreamwalker, too.”

  Finn crossed to the kitchen table and sat down.

  Nana lowered herself into the chair across the table. They were silent until Finn finally said, “Noah was in my dream last night.”

  “You had a dream last night?”

  Finn nodded and told Nana about it.

  “Didn’t you drink the tea?”

  “Yeah, I did. Why?”

  “It was supposed to help you have a dreamless sleep.”

  “Didn’t work.”

  “It didn’t work for Noah, either.” Nana looked at her hands for a long moment. “I’m going to call your mother, and then we need to go see Rafe.”

  “Why do we need to see Rafe?”

  “To keep you safe, Finn.”

  A thousand questions swirled in Finn’s mind. She watched Nana start to head toward her bedroom. “Safe from what, Nana? What does a Dreamwalker do?”

  Nana stopped. “I don’t really know, sweetheart. I mean, I’ve obviously heard things. About the river, explanations of the powers, the responsibilities. But I’m not sure I really understand it. Rafe can tell you more.”

  Nana continued down the hall.

  After a moment, Finn picked up Noah’s notebook and headed into his room. She laid it on her brother’s chest and turned the pages, trying to imagine why he’d written it. At the top of one page, she saw an orange circle. She smiled, imagining Noah eating Cheetos while writing his notes. Finn touched the orange smudge and then flipped to the next page.

  That’s when she saw it. Next to a childish drawing of a frog using scissors to cut a heart out of a piece of paper, he’d written, Finn. Crush? Marcus Hahn.

  A memory pushed forward. Biology class, the day they dissected frogs. It was horrible. Finn couldn’t make a single incision. Marcus Hahn had done the whole thing. Every time Mrs. Reynolds walked by, Marcus would hand Finn the blade so it looked like she was participating. She’d been so grateful. That night, she’d dreamed about it. The dream stood out because, until the last few days, it was one of the few she’d ever remembered.

  But she’d never told Noah about the class. Or the dream. Before he went into the coma, she never told him how she felt about Marcus. She was sure of it. There was no way for him to know, unless …

  Her heart started racing. What if what Nana said was true? What if … Noah could walk through people’s dreams? She leaned close to her brother’s ear. “If you were spying on me, I will hunt you down and make you pay.”

  She watched Noah, waiting, hoping for a response. But there wasn’t one.

  FOUR

  Nana’s mind was clearly somewhere else as they drove across town. Finn had to remind her to turn on her headlights.

  Before they left the house, Finn had gone to her room and typed Dreamwalker into a search engine. She mostly got back dream interpretation websites and a few about Native American traditions for finding wisdom in the world of dreams. The most interesting site referred to a tribe in the Northwest that created a map to the afterlife from directions people had received in their dreams. It seemed like a good subject for a history or social sciences paper.

  Finn had tried to ask her grandmother some of the questions that were buzzing in her head, mostly about how walking through dreams had caused Noah to lapse into a coma. But Nana didn’t know, or just didn’t want to say. So Finn stopped asking.

  It was cold outside, and the streets were nearly empty. Finn saw only one person, a man in a down coat and fuzzy hat walking a large and ferocious-looking dog.

  When they pulled up in front of Joe’s Boxing Gym, Nana put the car in park but didn’t turn it off. “We don’t know how long this will take,” she said. “So Rafe will drive you home when you’re finished.”

  “The guy’s a douche. I don’t want him driving me home.”

  “Language.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  The heat was on in the car, but Finn could feel the cold radiating off the window to her door. Winter’s here, she thought.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt, Finn. Rafe’s the only one I know who can help.”

  Finn felt a stab of anger in her chest. If it was so dangerous, why did anyone let Noah do it? There must have been a way to stop him. Why hadn’t they told Finn so she could help?

  “Nana,” Finn said, turning toward her grandmother. The light from inside the gym reflected off the tears in Nana’s eyes. Nana was crying. Finn suddenly couldn’t remember what she was about to say.

  “Go inside, Fionnuala. Please.”

  “Okay,” Finn said quietly, and then she climbed out of the car and headed into the gym. Only when Finn was inside the gym did her grandmother put the car in drive and pull away.

  * * *

  The gym smelled like a combination of sweat and herbs, vaguely reminiscent of Nana’s shed. Finn looked around but didn’t see Rafe, just a few people working out. An older woman viciously punched a hanging bag in the back of the room, like it had stolen her purse and she was going to get even with it, and two young men were doing mixed martial arts in the ring at the center of the gym. Their punches and kicks echoed loudly through the room. Finn winced when one of them took a blow to the head and fell to the ground.

  The woman on the heavy bag finally stopped her assault. “You Finn?” she called out.

  “Yes.”

  “Rafe said to tell you he’s upstairs.”

  The woman pointed to the wooden stairs leading to a second floor.

  “Thank you,” Finn said, but the woman had already returned to her workout, punching with even more fury.

  The wooden stairs didn’t fit with the rest of the building. There were holes, broken slats, and places where the wood was so thin you could read through it. The stairway looked downright dangerous. Finn glanced around. There didn’t appear to be another way up to the second floor.

  She put a foot onto the bottom stair. Even though it seemed solid, it sagged under just a little bit of weight. She decided she didn’t trust it or the second step and skipped to the third one. She continued like this, making conscious decisions about where to place her feet, until she reached the top. Then she looked at the wooden door in front of her. It was covered with carvings: A river flowed around the outside edge of the door with hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, places, and things hugging its banks. The carving was beautifully intricate and, like the stairs, exhausting.

  She raised a hand to knock on the door. “Come in, Finn,” Rafe called from inside the room before she’d made contact.

  Finn opened the door.

  She entered a room that was as calm as the stairs and door were busy. Rafe stood by a table carved from a single piece of wood. The surface was worn smooth and shiny. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with leather-bound volumes. The ceiling was a color Finn couldn’t quite describe except to think that it was incredibly soothing, and the floor … Finn had never experienced anything like it. As she walked to the table, her feet sank into it and were then pushed up. As though she was being propelled forward.

  Rafe was drinking something out of a brown ceramic mug. Another mug filled with steaming liquid sat across the table.

  “I made you some tea,” he said.

  “I don’t like tea.”

  “While we’re going through your training, you don’t have a choice, and trust me, it doesn’t taste better when it’s cold.”

  Finn sat down but left the tea alone. “What’s with the stairs?” she asked.

  “I made them myself.”

  “You miss a lot of classes when you took shop in high school?”

  She meant it as a joke, but he clearly didn’t think it was funny. He got up and crossed to t
he center of the room. She watched him fold himself into a seated position on the floor.

  “If you’ve decided to drink it later, then please join me.” Finn noticed, and hated, his assumption that she was going to give in and drink the tea.

  She stayed put. “Why is my brother in a coma?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what makes you think I can help him?”

  “I don’t know if you can.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the velvet bag he brought to her house. “This is a Herderite crystal. For thousands of years, it has been used to identify Dreamwalkers. Hundreds of years ago, people used the crystals to find the ‘witches’ who were letting demons into their dreams.” He reached into the bag and grabbed the chain with his bare hand. The minute it was free of the fabric, the crystal shot toward Finn like it had been fired out of a gun. She reacted, startled. But Rafe held tight to the chain so the crystal hung in the air, defying gravity.

  “How are you doing that?”

  “I’m not. You are. Something about the way Dreamwalkers vibrate.” He slipped the velvet bag over the crystal and then let go of it with his bare hand. The tension in the bag disappeared.

  Finn desperately wanted to leave, but the memory of the tears in her grandmother’s eyes stopped her. If she was stuck, then there was no reason not to learn as much as she could. She crossed to Rafe and sat down on the floor.

  “You ever read Jung?” he asked.

  Finn shook her head.

  “You know anything about the collective unconscious?” Finn shook her head again. “Axis mundi?”

  “No.”

  “What exactly do they teach you in school?”

  “How to make stairs that don’t kill people.”

  Finn saw a small smile play at the corners of his mouth, but it quickly faded.

  “Most people experience dreams passively, and their dreams, for the most part, are benign: They are a top hat–wearing banana slug or have sex with a favorite rock star. Those dreams are not our concern. Dreamwalkers exist to face the terrors: fears that come from being chased by monsters they can’t see and won’t fight. When that happens, people call out for help.”

  Finn noticed that Rafe’s left ear was higher than his right and that he’d missed a spot the last time he shaved. He also had a scar, a clean and symmetrical line circling around half his neck. She was wondering about what might have caused it when she realized he wasn’t talking anymore. He glared at her a beat before continuing. “Dreamwalkers are the warriors of the unconscious, moving through the dream space to battle the fears people face in their sleep. You help others find peace in their dreams so they can have peace in their lives.” His finger traced a wavy pattern on the floor. “Dreamwalkers wade into the River so the world stays in balance.”

  “This sounds like something you heard on a talk show.”

  Rafe leaned forward and spoke in barely a whisper. “It’s not. And what your grandmother knows and you do not is that the River of Dreams is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. If you don’t treat it with respect, the dreams will sweep you away. Or worse, fill you up until there is no you left.” He stared at her, clearly daring her to challenge him. She decided not to take the bait.

  “Is that what happened to Noah?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She thought he was lying. He confirmed the lie by looking away. “Dreamwalkers don’t usually come into their power before age sixteen,” he finally said. “Obviously, Noah was younger. Maybe he was too young for the fight.”

  Finn couldn’t picture her brother as a warrior. Not because he wasn’t strong or brave, but mostly because he never seemed to care about what was going on around him. Like any teenage boy, he often seemed trapped in his own head. Were the names in his notebook people he helped?

  “You know, this Dreamwalker thing, how come I’ve never heard of it? I looked on the Internet, and there’s nothing.”

  “If you go around talking about how you can walk through people’s dreams and fight monsters, folks think you’re crazy. Probably better to keep it to yourself. At least, that’s what most Dreamwalkers decide to do.”

  This was the first thing he’d said that made any sense.

  “Nana says you’re a Dreamwalker. Why didn’t Noah reach out to you?”

  “He can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just not possible,” he snapped. “Do you want me to help you or not?”

  Finn bit her tongue. Her brain was screaming run, but if dealing with Rafe was what it took to find out what happened to her brother, she was willing to do it.

  “Yeah, I do,” she said.

  “Tell me about the dreams you’ve been having.”

  Finn gave him an abridged version, and when she finished, he started asking questions.

  He wanted details, lots and lots of details: how Noah looked, did he seem to be struggling, where had the hummingbird come from, how had Finn felt, was she able to do anything unusual. After a long series of questions, he stopped and furrowed his brow. “When you were at school,” he finally asked. “You were thinking about the first dream and then…?”

  “I fell asleep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Finn was tired of his questions. It was time he answered some of hers. “Why did Noah keep getting pulled from me? First like a tornado, then as smoke?”

  She could tell he didn’t want to answer it, or maybe he didn’t like that she’d interrupted him, but he did anyway. “Your brother has gone to a deep, dark place. Something has hold of him. He’s fighting, trying to reach you. But the effort would be hard to sustain.” Finn thought back to her brother’s breathing, how it wasn’t as strong today as it had been before. Was what was happening in her dreams affecting Noah in real life?

  “In the dream last night,” Rafe continued, “was your father wearing a glowing cord anywhere on his body?”

  Finn didn’t know.

  “Think harder. You can remember everything you saw,” he said. “That’s the difference between you and regular people. Everyone else forgets what they dream. They have to make a conscious effort to remember. You’ll have to make a conscious effort to forget.”

  The way Rafe said it, that didn’t seem like a good thing.

  “Finn, was your father wearing anything that glowed?” Rafe demanded. “Think about it. Pause the memory if you have to, and look around.”

  Finn bit her tongue to keep herself from lashing out at him. She was angry. At Rafe, at the situation, but after a minute, she closed her eyes.

  For Nana. And Noah. Not for anyone else. After a moment, she was calm enough to bring back the dream. She saw herself—

  * * *

  Trapped in the box as her father approached. In the background, the smoky wisps of Noah were flying away.

  Her father wore a high-collared shirt, so she couldn’t see his neck. She took a breath and slowed everything down.

  Her father. Barely moving. She watched him. She could see the look in his eyes: cold and unfeeling, not at all like the man she remembered. Where was the man who taught her how to ride a bike and throw a baseball, the man who loved to cook hot dogs over an open fire and read books until way past bedtime? Her father had been kind and gentle. At least, that’s the way she remembered him.

  He’d been dead a long time. Did she remember him wrong? She knew she was supposed to look for a glowing item. But Finn was drawn back to his eyes, his cold eyes.

  Why was he looking at her like that?

  She watched him lift his hand to put it in front of the hole. Why did he want to block her view?

  His eyes … so dark.

  Why wouldn’t he help her; why was he looking at her like that?

  * * *

  “Dad,” she whimpered, still caught in the memory. “Dad, please.”

  From someplace far away, she heard Rafe talking to her. “Finn?” She opened her eyes, tried to clea
r the image from her head.

  “I couldn’t see anything that glowed.”

  “How about you? Were you wearing a necklace or a bracelet? Were you able to see in the dark?”

  Finn forced herself to go back into the memory of the dream.

  * * *

  She saw her hands, reaching through the darkness.

  * * *

  “I could see my hands.”

  “Then you have one.”

  “One what?”

  “A Lochran. It’s the source of your power.”

  “Like a superhero’s cape?”

  “Clark Kent wears a suit, but he’s still Superman, cape or no cape. Without your Lochran, you are not a Dreamwalker.”

  “Why?”

  He took a minute and finally just said, “I don’t know.” It hung there. A moment of truth, better than all his bravado. He stood up. “For some reason, a long, long time ago, the Lochran was gifted to some and not to others. Nobody really knows how or why. But here we are.”

  He walked to the table. He grabbed the mug of tea and brought it back to her. “This will taste like shit. A hard way to learn to drink it while it’s hot. It’s not as strong as what your grandmother gave you last night but—”

  “She said that tea was just to help me sleep better.”

  “In a manner of speaking. It was supposed to put you to sleep so deeply you had limited access to the River.”

  “She drugged me?”

  “Just because dreams aren’t in this reality doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you. Something happened to your brother in the dream space, something that kept him from coming back. Your grandmother doesn’t want that to happen to you. She did what she thought was best.”

  Finn looked in the mug at a liquid that looked like dirt mixed with motor oil. She drank it. It tasted like dirt mixed with motor oil.

  “Tonight,” Rafe said, “you’ll have dreams. This tea helps you focus your intentions. When your dream starts, I want you to lie down.”

  Finn stared at him. This was his big piece of wisdom?

  “I know you want to help your brother, but you can’t. You don’t know what you’re doing. So no matter what happens, who you see, what they ask of you, do nothing. Even if another Dreamwalker is the one doing the asking.”