Dreaming Dangerous

by Lauren DeStefano

  “Thirty hours and twenty minutes, sir,” Plum answered.

  Behind the lenses of his round glasses, Dr. Abarrane looked at the children’s linked hands.

  “We need to do something about that,” he said. “If you can’t sleep, you can’t dream. And if you can’t dream—well, no good can come of that, now, can it?”

  Plum did not understand the significance of her dreams. None of the students at Brassmere knew why they were exceptional, or what it mattered. But Plum knew that without her dreams, her mind was starting to feel hazy and wrong. Colors seemed dull. Her head felt heavy.

  She could feel Vien and Gwendle watching her, fretting quietly. Dr. Abarrane nodded to each of them. “I trust the two of you can find your own way to your classes this morning.”

  Vien blinked, confused. “Sir?”

  Dr. Abarrane smiled, all the creases on his face appearing like lines freshly drawn. “Leave Plum to me. It’s all right. Off with you now.”

  Plum nodded at each of them. She was so tired. The second hand in the clock on the wall felt like a pounding hammer. “I’ll be okay,” she told them, and she knew that this wasn’t a lie. No matter what happened to any of them, things always turned out for the best. They were all safe here.

  She felt Vien’s hesitation in particular when he and Gwendle left the room. But then the door closed behind them, and she heard their footsteps getting farther away down the polished hallway.

  A slight smile appeared on Dr. Abarrane’s face. “I remember the day I found you in particular, you know,” he said. “You were the very first.” Plum had heard this story before, of course, but she never grew tired of it. Sometimes, when she was by herself and feeling strangely lonely about things, she thought of it. If she thought hard enough, she could even see it playing out:

  A rainy November night, ice cold. On an empty street with no houses for miles, a church had caught fire after an altar boy had neglected to blow out the candles before leaving for the evening. It was dark as ink and windy.

  An infant had been left on the front steps, in a wooden crate from the farmers’ market, the juice from its plums still staining the slats of it. The infant might have frozen to death if not for the warmth of the flames. And the flames might have burned her alive, except rather than swallowing the plum crate and the baby inside it, the flames formed a protective ring around her.

  This was how Dr. Abarrane found her, and how he knew that she was something exceptional.

  Plum was the first child Dr. Abarrane found, but she was soon to be joined by more than a dozen others. Some were found in orphanages, and others were the lone survivors of horrific accidents. Vien was found in the wreckage of a shredded Cadillac, and Gwendle was buried in the rubble of a cottage that had been half swallowed by a sinkhole.

  Artem had been left right at the gate, under the protective watch of the stone gargoyles, wrapped in a red plaid ascot like a baby bird in a nest.

  Dr. Abarrane’s smile faded. “Plum, I don’t know where Artem is, but I need you to find him.”

  “You’d like me to go out and search?” she asked.

  He opened the drawer of his desk. “No.” He extracted a key, long and slender and rusted. “Follow me.”

  Plum followed him down the hall and into the infirmary. It was a large wing with several curtained-off beds and a nursery, which would be filled with new arrivals soon, Plum suspected. Brassmere was never without babies for long. They always seemed to find their way to where they belonged.

  Nurse Penny stood from her desk when she saw them arrive. She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped when she saw the key in Dr. Abarrane’s hand.

  “Plum is going to need a quiet place to rest,” he said.

  Whatever this meant, Nurse Penny seemed to understand. The key she turned opened a door that Plum had always assumed was a medicine closet, in no small part due to the sign above the knob that read Supplies.

  But once the door had been opened, Plum realized it was not a closet at all, but a short hallway that led to four other locked doors, one of which responded to the same key. That door led to a small study, with floor-to-ceiling books and a green leather divan with an oversize matching pillow. There was a window, but upon further inspection, Plum realized that it was fake, its scenery of a sunlit valley painted in oils.

  It was the window that frightened Plum. Suddenly, she felt very far from Brassmere. Far from Vien and Gwendle, and especially Artem. But she did not let her fear show. She had never been a skittish one, and she didn’t want Dr. Abarrane or Nurse Penny to think she was weak.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Nurse Penny said. She was very kind—the kindest person at Brassmere by far. “This is just another branch of the infirmary. Go ahead and lie down.”

  Tentatively, Plum lay on the divan. The leather was soft and warm. The pillow was filled with feathers.

  “Just relax now,” Dr. Abarrane said. “You’re going to rest, and soon, you’ll be as good as new.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Though she knew this was a dream, Plum remembered that it was raining outside. She could still hear the dull patter of it hitting the roof. She could smell the oak from the fire, and the odd perfumed polish of the leather divan where she’d fallen asleep.

  She looked up, and the clouds were speaking to one another. “Alert me of any changes to her vitals,” Dr. Abarrane’s voice was saying.

  Nurse Penny was answering him, but her voice was farther away, and it echoed. “… experimental drug … could be dangerous …”

  Plum didn’t hear anything Dr. Abarrane said, except for one word: urgent.

  Then they were both gone.

  You’re dreaming, Plum reminded herself. Vien and Gwendle aren’t here. They’re in class. It’s the daytime.

  Isn’t it?

  As she had this thought, the sky turned light and the clouds began to disperse. She was in the grand foyer at Brassmere, and the piano was playing itself.

  “Melinda?” Plum asked. She knew that if she saw Melinda, it wouldn’t really be her. Whenever she, Vien, Gwendle, or Artem saw someone they knew in their dream, they referred to them as a ghost. They weren’t real, and anything they said was merely a projection of the friends’ own thoughts.

  But no one answered Plum, not even a ghost. One after another, the keys moved to the tune of the strange song Melinda had played the night before.

  Plum moved for the hallway. All the bedroom doors were closed, and when Plum tried to open one of them, she realized that they were not doors at all. They were merely paintings.

  The hallway went on and on forever, stretching into an unreachable darkness.

  “Hello?” she called out, her voice strong and clear. There was an echo, like in the cave the last time she dreamed. She had a sense that she was supposed to be somewhere important.

  But this dream felt strange; even in this state, she knew that something was wrong with her sleep. She was too aware of the room that Dr. Abarrane and Nurse Penny had led her to. She could feel the faint prick of the needle in her arm, though when she looked down at herself, nothing was there. She rubbed at the bright blue vein in the crease of her left arm, where she knew the IV needle was imbedded.

  Thunder shook the walls. Plum spun around to face the giant windows that made up the grand foyer. The sky had turned deep gray with churning clouds and wild flashes of lightning. Though none of the windows were open, a breeze rolled through the room, making the piano keys flutter as though they were stacks of paper weighed down by a rock. Their music was faint and fluttery and erratic.

  “Plum?” a voice called to her, so faint she nearly missed it. “Plum, where are you?”

  “Artem?” She staggered left and right, trying to follow the sound. “Artem!”

  “You have to leave Brassmere,” Artem said. His voice was nearly lost over the wind. It had gotten much harsher, and Plum hugged her arms, shivering. Her dark hair whipped sharply to one side. “You have to get out.”

  Plum ra
n for the door and pulled at the heavy oak handle. It didn’t budge. “How?” she asked. “How did you get out?”

  Something growled, and when Plum looked out the window, through the gray and the flying leaves, she saw the dark, lumbering shadow of a monster. It was tall and hunched, almost like a bear but with long, sharp ears. It looked at her, its eyes flashed red.

  Plum was not one to shy away from monsters in dreams, but she had the sense that somehow this monster was different. There was no sense in hiding. The hallway and all the doors behind her were painted. There was nowhere to go but forward.

  She tried the handle again, and this time, the door swung open.

  The air outside turned white, the wind and rain violent. She could barely see through the gloom of it as she moved forward. “Artem!” She kept calling his name.

  The monster growled in the trees, and Plum followed the sound. If this monster was so determined to have her attention, then fine. There was probably a reason for it.

  “What do you want?” she called out. She stood still, her hair and clothes soaked. The monster emerged before her. Its fur was matted and gray, filled with bits of twigs and caterpillars and various forest things.

  It was a great, lumbering thing, with tiny dark eyes and an enormous mouth filled with yellow fangs.

  It seemed perplexed that Plum wasn’t afraid, and it canted its head curiously at her, giving another fearsome growl.

  Plum was not easy to scare, as this thing was bound to learn. But she was curious where this monster had come from. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she would create. It was more Artem’s doing. Poor Artem, who was always so frightened of what things might be lurking in the shadows of his dreams, was the cause of so many monsters they spent their nights battling.

  “What have you done with Artem?” she asked the monster, as though she were merely asking directions to the tea shop.

  The monster opened its mouth again, and this time it didn’t growl. This time, its mouth became so wide that it was big enough to devour a girl like Plum in a single bite. And that’s what it did. The monster grabbed Plum in its clawed paws and, before she could do a thing to stop it, ate her.

  CHAPTER 7

  Being eaten by a monster would normally be the sort of thing that woke Plum from her sleep.

  But as she fell through the bottomless damp darkness of the monster’s throat, she felt her arm still throbbing. In the waking world, the needle was still in her arm, she knew. She remembered the strange purple liquid that had trailed from the bag and down the tube into her skin. Something within her began to panic, and she battled it down, a monster of its own.

  It’s only a dream, she reminded herself, as she fell and fell for what seemed like years. This has to end sometime. If Vien, Gwendle, or Artem were here, this dark tunnel of monster mouth would not have lasted this long. One of them would have dreamed up an end to it.

  But Plum was alone. Artem had stopped calling to her. She tried to shout for him, but found that she had no voice when she opened her mouth.

  For the first time, in this dream, Plum began to panic. She’d always felt safe in even her most dangerous of dreams because she knew that she would wake up if she died. But she was not allowed to wake up this time. Maybe she had died. Maybe the monster swallowing her whole was enough to kill her in this dream, and now she would be trapped here until the needle was extracted from her arm.

  Dr. Abarrane had seemed so worried about her, and she had been so tired, so desperate for sleep that she hadn’t questioned the purple liquid in the IV bag. It was not uncommon practice for students at Brassmere to receive similar treatments for various things—insomnia, broken bones, inconsolable anxieties. Dr. Abarrane’s treatments always helped. They always did.

  But Plum needed to wake up now, and she couldn’t.

  Then, her feet touched the ground. Anxiety surged through her, a mix of wonder and relief that her fall had at last come to an end.

  She was on a cobblestoned street now, in a city that didn’t resemble Brassmere’s campus at all. There was a tall clock tower just ahead, its bold yellow face glowing against the fog. The numbers on the clock face were replaced with odd symbols, and the hands moved in erratic patterns. This was common in dreams, where time made no sense.

  The city itself gurgled and groaned, and Plum remembered that she was in the belly of the monster that had eaten her. Bits of bloody fur stuck to the brick faces of the surrounding buildings. It was damp here. Rain drizzled into puddles. And the sky had no stars.

  All the windows in all the buildings were dark, except for one. She followed the cobblestone pathway to the only illuminated window in the city.

  The window was large, almost the size of the building itself. As Plum drew nearer, it became obvious that the three people on the other side of the window couldn’t see her. Interesting. They must have been ghosts, Plum thought, or figments of her imagination.

  The window revealed one room, which appeared to be a sort of office, with a steel desk and stacks of papers raining down from shelves along the walls. At one side of the desk sat a man, in a peculiar uniform Plum had never seen before. It was all blue, with a gold star pinned to the breast pocket. Even without being close enough to read the word, Plum knew what it said: Sheriff.

  Sheriff. This was a word she didn’t know in the waking world. She was certain she’d never heard it anywhere before.

  On the other side of the desk sat a woman and a man. Their chairs were pushed together, and they were holding each other’s hands. They were crying.

  They were beautiful, Plum thought. The woman had short dark hair, upon which was pinned a small hat bejeweled with stones and amber-colored feathers. She wore a long, simple brown dress. Her lips were painted peach pink, and her eyes were dark and glistening with tears.

  The man wore a pinstriped suit with a handkerchief tucked neatly into its pocket, folded in a perfect triangle.

  They were very much in love with each other, this man and woman. Somehow Plum knew this.

  The woman blew her nose into a cloth handkerchief with lace trim. Plum could see all the fine details in the lace even from where she stood. That was the fascinating thing about dreams: little pieces of the world Plum never noticed when she was awake suddenly became beautiful.

  The man with the gold star folded his hands and hunched forward on his desk. “We’re going to do everything we can to find her,” he said.

  This only made the woman sob louder. The sound of those sobs echoed in all the dark alleyways and between the stars themselves.

  The light in the window began to dim. The man and the woman started to fade. “Wait!” Plum cried. “Don’t go.”

  They had never really been there, Plum knew. They were just ghosts. But something in her chest ached for them.

  It was no matter. They didn’t hear her. She pressed her hands to the glass just as it all disappeared.

  Plum looked around to discover that she was alone again in a strange city that seemed to be empty.

  “You were right.” Artem’s voice. A moment later, he materialized from the blackness of an alleyway. He was lit up by the glow of the clock tower.

  “Artem!” Plum ran to him and threw her arms around him. “There you are! Where have you been?” This was not a ghost. Plum knew the difference. He was asleep and dreaming and had found his way to her here.

  When he hugged her back, his arms felt weak. Plum drew back and held him by the shoulders as she inspected him. His cheeks were gaunt, his eyes ringed with dark lines, much worse than they’d been the last time she saw him. And all her elation at finding him turned into a deep and heavy dread that sat in her stomach.

  “You were right to keep our dream from Dr. Abarrane.” He grabbed her wrists. “Plum, listen to me, you can’t tell them anything. You have to lie to them. Say you dreamed about the usual things, but don’t tell them what you just saw.”

  Plum shook her head. “I don’t understand. What did I just dream? Who were those p
eople?”

  “I don’t know,” Artem said. “But I’ve been having dreams like this for a while. People who are searching and searching for something they can’t ever find.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Plum said. “I’m there for all your dreams, and I’ve never seen them.”

  Artem looked so sad. His mouth turned pensively downward, and he had trouble looking into her eyes. This wasn’t like him at all, and it worried her and filled her with sympathy. She wanted desperately to console him. “I haven’t told you everything,” he said. “I thought it was a fluke, at first. I’d have dreams where I was in this city. I saw two people looking for something. Something important, but I could never figure out what it was. They didn’t see me. It never lasted for very long. Soon enough it would all fade and I’d meet up with you and Vien and Gwendle.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Plum asked. She tugged at one of his brown curls affectionately, trying to reassure him. It didn’t work; he didn’t offer so much as a fleeting smile. “We would have helped you figure out what was going on.”

  “I was scared.” Artem’s eyes were wide. “I thought something was wrong with me. I thought—I thought—well, just that something was wrong, that’s all. I didn’t tell anybody, but the pinks knew something was amiss when they monitored my pulse. They told Dr. Abarrane I was hiding something and that I was no longer to be trusted. I don’t know, maybe Dr. Abarrane has never trusted me, Plum.”

  “What did Dr. Abarrane say?”

  Artem’s grip on her wrists tightened. “Plum, listen to me. When you wake up, you can’t tell him that you saw me here. You have to warn Vien and Gwendle. He’s going to come for them, too. He’s going to come for you.”