by Jan Nash
“Where are you?” Finn screamed, wind whistling past her ears.
There was no response. Finn stopped and clung to the trunk of the tree as it whipped back and forth. She closed her eyes and listened. She heard the sound of a muffled voice. The child was very near.
What now?
Finn remembered what Rafe had said: Honor the logic of the dream. Finn tried to stay calm. The logic of the dream: forest, trees, wood …
She held out her hand. On her palm, a flame sparked. She willed it to grow.
“Stop moving,” she told the tree. “Or I will burn you down.”
The swaying stopped.
Finn took a few tentative steps away from the trunk, steadying herself by holding on to the limb above her.
“Where is she?” When the tree didn’t respond, she brought the fire closer to the needles on the branch next to her. They began to smoke, and the tree shuddered. Finn pulled the fire away. “Show me where she is,” she insisted.
After a moment, a few trees over, a limb unfurled, revealing a young girl, probably no more than eight. She was wearing yellow-and-pink pajamas.
Finn held up the flame. “I’m going to throw this to you. Catch it. It won’t hurt you. Hold the fire and tell the tree to put you down. Okay?”
The girl nodded. Finn could feel fear radiating from the child. Something was wrong in her life. Something was terribly wrong.
“Are you in second grade?”
“Third,” the girl responded quietly.
“Do you like your teacher?” she asked, gently.
“Yes. Mrs. Bassett. She’s nice.”
“Run to Mrs. Bassett. Even when you wake up, go to her. Ask her for help.” Finn saw fear in the child’s eyes.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Yes, you can, sweetheart. The light will help you find your way. Mrs. Bassett will help you find your way.”
She tossed the ball of fire toward the girl. Impossibly, it stayed lit as it flew through the air. The girl caught it. It lit up her face. She was beautiful.
“What about you?” the girl asked.
Finn smiled. “I’m going to be fine.” Finn showed her hand, where another blue flame already sat on her palm.
“Put me down,” the girl said to the tree, holding out her flame.
For a moment, nothing happened. The girl pressed the flame closer to the tree. It began to move, bowing like a servant before a king. Finn watched as the tree set the girl down on the forest floor. She followed the flame as it moved through the trees and into the distance. Finn realized she didn’t know the girl’s name. She’d ask Rafe if there was a way to find her and make sure she was safe.
Standing on top of the tree, Finn felt … powerful. She didn’t know if she’d ever felt this way. At least, not in a long time.
She blew out her blue flame and was swallowed by the darkness. She was about to return to the River when, in the distance, she saw a circle of light. It grew brighter until she could see what was in the center of it: Noah, sitting in a tree, trying to get her attention.
“Noah! I’m coming.”
She jumped across the span between her and the next tree. The limb flexed, and she used the movement to propel herself forward.
The circle dimmed.
“Hold on!” But even as she screamed the words, Noah’s light went out. Finn leaped to the place where he’d been. He was gone, but … there was something.
A hole in the air.
Blacker than night. Without thinking, Finn reached into it.
Her arm disappeared into cold nothingness. And exploded with pain.
She screamed and tried to pull her arm out of the void. Something was holding her, pulling at her. It was hard to breathe. Her head was full of a terrible buzzing. She anchored her foot against the tree and pushed with all her might, yanking against whatever was holding her until she finally fell backward, landing on the branch. Finn’s arm was heavy. An eel, damp, glistening in the dim light of the crescent moon, had swallowed her arm up to the elbow. Without thinking, Finn slammed the eel on the branch. She lost her balance; she and the eel began to fall, bouncing from one limb to the next. She tried to get a handhold but couldn’t. She finally landed, hard, on the forest floor.
The impact caused the eel to release its grip. She pulled her arm out of its mouth. It lay still, only its mouth moving, almost like it was talking.
Finn edged closer. A whisper, “Malum.”
And then … the eel was gone, and Finn was filled with a terrible fear. “Noah!” she screamed. Her voice rang into the distance, then there was only silence, except for the roar of the blood in her body.
She was scared.
Keep breathing, she told herself.
Close your eyes and go to sleep.
Be strong for Noah.
Take one more breath.
Everything will be okay.
Everything will be …
TEN
When Finn’s alarm clock went off, she rolled over to hit the button and felt a piercing pain across her shoulders. She fell back onto her bed. It all flooded back: the fall out of the tree; the eel; the sense of Noah’s absence, that he’d been swallowed, taken by something otherworldly.
But how her body felt didn’t make sense. Dreams weren’t real. She shouldn’t hurt. Finn pushed herself up to a seated position and hit the alarm button to stop its blaring. She saw Eddie sitting in the door. Had he walked down to find out why it was taking so long to turn off the alarm?
“When I watched you run while you slept,” Finn said to him, “I never thought you were actually going somewhere.” He cocked his head sideways, looking at her curiously, and then turned to pad back to Noah’s room.
* * *
Finn was glad she’d put a hat on because, at the speed she was walking, it was going to take all day to get to school, and it was cold outside. Nana was worried when she’d seen how slow Finn was moving, but Finn blamed it on Rafe. Finn felt bad for lying, but she needed to think things through.
She had so many questions and no confidence she could get answers by herself. She needed to talk to someone.
Jed was her only option.
Nana had offered to give Finn and Jed a ride to school, but Finn lied again, said she wanted the fresh air. What she really thought was that Jed would ask a lot of questions, and when he got interested in something, he talked louder. She didn’t need the whole school wondering what a Dreamwalker was.
She’d texted Jed that she was leaving the house and to watch for her. She didn’t want to have to take off her gloves to text him as she got close.
He was waiting at the sidewalk when she got there. He was not wearing a hat.
“You’re going to freeze to death,” she told him.
“I dried my hair,” he replied, referring to his habit of coming outside right after his shower, regardless of the temperature. “Why are you walking like a ninety-year-old?”
“Long story.”
“Apparently it’s going to be a long, slow walk, so go ahead.”
It was the opening she needed. Except, even though she’d thought about telling him what was going on, she hadn’t actually thought about how she was going to say it.
She looked away. “God, it’s cold out here.”
“Are you pregnant?”
Finn laughed. “I haven’t had a boyfriend since—”
She looked at Jed. His face was a mask of confusion and … something she couldn’t quite read. The question was real.
“No, I’m not pregnant.”
“Then why have you been acting so weird?”
So she told him.
Starting with the dreams, and then learning that Noah was a Dreamwalker and that she was a Dreamwalker. She told him about the lessons with Rafe, and how Rafe thought Noah was reaching out to her. She even told him about saving the little girl the night before, and the eel and Noah and Malum. When she finished, they were a block from school. Jed stopped and turned to face her. It had go
tten really cold over the last fifteen minutes.
“Are you bullshitting me?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“No.”
“If I call Nana, she’d say the same thing?”
“I haven’t told her everything that’s happened, but mostly.”
He stood there, staring at her. It felt like forever. Then an impossibly large smile spread across his face.
“That’s cool. Are you sure you’re not crazy?”
“No.”
She pulled Noah’s journal from her backpack. She’d brought it so she could read it in the spare or boring moments that presented themselves. She flipped through it. “This is Noah’s journal. He wrote down what he’d learned, the dreams he had. Some of the people he helped.”
He stared intently as the pages went by. “The little guy was more artistic than I gave him credit for. But this isn’t proof it happened. It’s just proof he kept a journal.”
“I told you I was in Moby’s dream?”
“Yeah.”
“He came to my house last night.”
“Why?”
“He said to bring me homework. But I think we had some sort of dream … connection.”
“Or he might like you.”
“Until he came to my house, we’d barely spoken to each other.”
“Who knows what he does with that computer of his. Maybe he came by to install a spy camera in your bedroom.”
Finn was starting to think she was wrong to tell Jed, that there was no way anyone could accept that this was real. He’d stopped looking at her. He was just staring over her shoulder into the distance.
“Jed?” He looked back at her, his face a mask. “I need your help.” It took a moment, but then the smile she loved crept back onto this face.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. She was hurt, a little, that he hadn’t agreed right away. Though, she knew it sounded crazy. Maybe even Jed had his limits.
Jed checked his phone. “You have made us late. We can talk more at lunch. Now come on, my little subconscious warrior. Before we freeze our faces off.”
* * *
During New World History, as Mr. Newsome droned on about the various interrelationships of the European ruling families during the Middle Ages, Finn started making a list of what she knew about Noah’s travels and the connections with Sydney Norwich. Nothing new revealed itself as she made her lists. All she managed to do was not be paying attention when Mr. Newsome called on her with a question about Eleanor of Aquitaine. And the only reason she thought that was the question was because he’d written Eleanor’s name on the whiteboard.
“Sorry, Mr. Newsome.”
“It was in the reading before you got sick, Miss Driscoll.”
Seth coughed, quietly. She glanced over at him. He had written Henry II in capital letters next to his row of numbers. France and England were below that, connected with an arrow. Finn turned back to the front of the room.
“I’m just a little foggy. Um … I think it’s Henry the Second. And France … to England?”
“The uptick in your voice doesn’t inspire confidence, but you’re right.”
Finn waited until Mr. Newsome went back to his whiteboard, and then she mouthed Thank you to Seth. He smiled. Whatever trauma she’d caused by popping into his dream, it seemed that he was over it.
* * *
Jed was waiting when she got to the cafeteria. Like he did every day, he checked her tray as she set it on the table. “You’ve got your appetite back.”
She looked down at her tray. It was full of food.
When she looked back at him, he had that look on his face that he got when there was a new cool thing to be learned and mastered. “I’m in,” he said.
“What if it’s all in my head?”
“Then we have a funny story to tell later. What do you need me to do?”
Finn pulled Noah’s notebook out of her bag.
“I want to find Noah.”
“Got it. Save the little guy.”
“I’ve been through his dream journal. Noah was on some sort of quest. To where or for what, I don’t know. There are some symbols—a triangle-circle-square thing—and a labyrinth. But other than that … it’s just an almost infinite world of possibilities.”
“It’s like a video game.”
“Kind of.”
He took the notebook and tucked it into his book bag.
When he turned back to her, she said, “I know you’ve got questions. Go ahead.” His face lit up.
“So it’s like having superpowers?”
“Not exactly.” Finn explained the way the dream world worked, at least what she’d figured out so far and what Rafe had told her. Jed took it in, occasionally interrupting to compare it to some graphic novel or movie he loved.
“I want you to check out my dreams,” he finally said when she finished.
“I’m not sure I should do that. I freaked Moby out.”
“I’m not asking you to go in and help me slay a dragon. Just come look, and then we can talk about it the next day.”
“Do you remember your dreams?”
“Not always, but if I don’t, I don’t. This is the only way to confirm it’s really happening.”
He was right about that. Jed picked up a french fry. “If all these dreams are like a river, could you walk backward in it to see a dream someone had in the past? Like the dream I had when I was seven about going to the center of the sun and discovering it was made of Gummi Bears?”
“I have no idea.”
It was a question she’d never thought to ask. Jed was good at that kind of thinking. He shrugged and started to dig into his lunch. “It’d be way cool if you could.”
* * *
The rest of the day passed in the normal way that school days do, some good moments, some not so good. In Algebra II, Jack Bliss, a boy who normally acted like the class was being conducted in a foreign language, successfully solved a quadratic equation. The rightness of his answer caught everyone by surprise. So much so that when Jack turned from the smartboard looking as if he’d just won a Nobel Prize, the class burst into applause. Diane Billingsley, the head cheerleader, even high-fived Jack as he walked back to his seat. “I don’t know what happened. It just clicked” was all Jack could say.
That victory carried Finn all the way to her final class, biology, when she turned a corner and saw Deborah Marks with her arms wrapped around Marcus outside the classroom. Right as the bell rang, Deborah whispered something in his ear, and Marcus blushed. Deborah took off down the hall; Marcus smiled and walked into the lab.
Finn realized there was a tight place in her chest.
Which didn’t make any sense. Other than that one dissection, they barely interacted. They didn’t text. They didn’t sit next to each other in the cafeteria or study hall. She didn’t know the names of his parents or if he had any siblings.
Why did Finn care if Marcus liked Deborah Marks?
The second bell rang. When it stopped, the sound of it kept bouncing around the empty hallway.
And Finn suddenly realized she didn’t. She was just sad that high school was never going to be that for her. Even if she could get past the cloud of doom everyone saw floating over her, how could she focus on the sewing club (was there a sewing club and would they let her in even if she didn’t know how to sew?) when she needed to save her brother?
She followed Marcus into the lab. She hoped he and Deborah were happy. And she hoped that someday she’d be happy like that, too.
ELEVEN
Finn forced herself to finish Fahrenheit 451. It was a great book, full of worthy thoughts and sympathetic, if flawed, characters. But she was happy to be done with it so she could write her paper. Mrs. Jepsen, her English teacher, felt bad about Noah. Finn knew that because she’d said it about a hundred times. She’d probably give Finn a pretty good grade even if she wrote a shitty paper, which was almost certain since her goal was writing fast, not making sense.
On the wa
lk home from school, she and Jed had decided that he would focus on Noah’s journal; she would focus on Sydney Norwich’s memoir. Since she’d already read it, they thought it an efficient use of resources, but they were both also fairly certain he’d get bored in the middle.
Finn finished her paper in about an hour (she’d titled it “The Liberation of Censorship,” hoping it sounded smart, even though Finn wasn’t sure that the paper itself supported the provocative title), and then turned to the Internet. She’d already searched for Sydney when she first read his book. There had been a lot of Sydney Norwiches in the world, but none of them were the one she was looking for. She didn’t think she’d have any better luck today, so instead she started researching Somersetshire, Sydney’s home.
Somersetshire was by all accounts a beautiful place. Green hills, lots of old buildings. People from the area seemed unnaturally focused on a storm in 1703, which destroyed the local church. But other than that … lots of green hills and old buildings. Finn couldn’t find any mention of Dreamwalkers or magic. Or even “Magick,” which is how they sometimes spelled it back then. The only thing Finn found that might be helpful was a nearby monastery known, then and now, for its library. “Books left by travelers of all nations,” someone said. Maybe there was something there that would help. But how the hell was she going to get to a monastery in England?
Before she could formulate an answer or even decide if it was the right question, she heard a knock on her door. Finn clicked to the web page she’d opened about Ray Bradbury and mumbled, “Come in,” pretending to be engrossed in the information in front of her as Nana entered the room.
“How’s it going, sweetheart?” Finn turned around and sighed when she saw the mug in Nana’s hand. “Rafe called. He said you were supposed to come over this afternoon.”
Finn held up the printout of her report. “I had to finish my paper.” She heard how lame it sounded. Her brother’s life was at stake. “And … I don’t think Rafe knows any more than you do.”