Exit Light

by Megan Hart

  The world wasn’t shaking, at least not here, and the terror that had battered them before had relented. It hadn’t disappeared, not exactly, but it had faded to a manageable amount. Tovah found she could breathe again, and hadn’t realized she’d been unable to, before.

  The cinderblock walls got fuzzy now and again, a sign the boy’s concentration was with other things. Tovah took the chance to try and catch his attention. She moved forward, her arms pulling Spider and Ben with her, though they resisted hard enough to keep her from getting close enough to touch the boy.

  “Hey,” she said gently.

  He lifted his head, took in the sight of their clasped hands. “You want me to stop, I know.”

  “Can you?” Tovah’s voice stayed gentle. “Do you want to?”

  The boy said nothing for what seemed a very long time. In one hand he held the woman-puppet, in the other the beast-doll. He clutched them hard and drew his knees to his chest, burying his face. His thin shoulders heaved.

  “I want my mom and dad.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know!” The boy’s fingers linked around his knees. She could see he’d bitten his nails down so far they had to be sore.

  The walls around them faded entirely, leaving only the cot and the boy with his toys. They were back to black sand and sky. The screams, this time, weren’t so far off. The club Tovah had always been so fond of shaping surged and seethed just beyond the boy’s cot, but instead of writhing in ecstasy the occupants squirmed and wailed in terror.

  Edward stepped from the shadows. The boy looked up, sniffling. He threw a gaze of sheer desperation toward Tovah and lifted his puppets.

  “No!” Tovah’s cry turned his head, stopped him for a moment, but it wasn’t enough.

  The boy lifted his puppets higher, holding them out to either side of his body. “I’m sorry.”

  In the club, the screams got louder.

  Without speaking, without even thinking too much about it, Tovah opened herself to the threads of Spider’s will and Ben’s. The boy pushed. They pushed back.

  It was like trying to shape water, fluid and slippery, without form. The world around them whirled in the way only dreams could, flashing bits and pieces of scenes and sending emotional currents washing over them. Tovah drew strength from her friends and knitted it with her own, sending it out to force away the bad.

  Beside her, Ben groaned. His eyelids fluttered. But Ben was stronger than she was, wasn’t he? She looked at Spider, who stared impassively at the boy. Only the vein ticking in his temple gave away his strain.

  “I…can’t.” Ben’s mutter nudged Tovah’s ear. “This isn’t like making an oasis…”

  “You have to.” Spider’s voice allowed no argument. “It’s coming apart at the seams.”

  He was right. The fabric of the Ephemeros was unraveling around them, and what would that mean? No more dreams? Or something more dramatic?

  “Is it something you want to risk?” Spider snapped, answering the question she hadn’t asked aloud.

  Clutching her friends tight, Tovah used every bit of skill she had. “Remember what you told me, Spider, when I needed to find the way out. Exit light. Do it now. Exit light!”

  The mantra wasn’t working. Beside her, Ben’s hand flared hot and the force of his desire rubbed her like sandpaper. On the other side, Spider’s grim determination tasted like gasoline, burning her tongue.

  “I can’t let you do this, son,” Spider said. “I can’t let you take this place away from me. It’s all I got.”

  Tovah turned her head to look at her friend. “Spider, that’s not true!”

  He didn’t look at her. “It’s all I got, Tovahleh. It’s more real to me than anything else. And I won’t let this kid break it into pieces.”

  The boy cried out, backing up a step and dragging his puppets with him. Spider’s will pulsed and throbbed, pushing outward. A hint of blue sky edged the darkness the boy’s fear had created. It was a start, but not enough.

  Tovah’s stomach lurched. “Listen to me. They’re a part of you. They can only hurt or scare you if you let them, just like any other dream. I’ll teach you how to get out. But you have to trust me.”

  The boy looked at the woman and the beast. The earth shook. The sky opened and lightning flashed inside the rent. “I’m scared! I’m scared to get out.”

  “I know you are.” Strength and compassion filled Tovah’s voice.

  “Leave him alone.” Edward, feet bare and hand reaching, appeared. He stepped toward the boy, who looked up at once.

  “We don’t want to hurt him,” Tovah protested. She looked from Spider to Ben and back again. “Do we?”

  “Tovahleh,” Spider said, “he’s got to be stopped.”

  “You don’t mean to hurt him,” she said, understanding. “You want to kill him.”

  She looked at Ben. “You knew this, too?”

  He had the grace to look guilty. “Spider told me.”

  This was a betrayal worse than any she’d known, and Tovah fought to keep herself from reeling with the shock of it. “You both decided this without asking me? Why wait, then? Why not just do it?”

  “Because we need you, Tovahleh,” Spider said. “We couldn’t do it alone. You’re the only one—”

  She shook her head. She would not listen to this half-assed rationale. “You should have told me. He’s just a kid! Look at him!”

  “It’s a representation, Tovah!” Ben cried. “He’s not a boy any more than Spider is a spider.”

  Tovah did not believe that. She’d seen the truth in the boy’s words, and in the scene he’d dreamed for them. “He’s a boy. And he’s in trouble. Is this why you wanted me to become a guide?”

  Ben’s guilty look gave her an answer, but Tovah fixed her glare on Spider. “Is it, Spider? To do things like this? To decide who gets to play and who doesn’t?”

  Spider’s expression turned grim. “You have a lot of power, Tovahleh. You need to use it for something other than selfishness.”

  A slap would have hurt her less and been more easily forgiven. “Were you just using me?”

  “No, Tovahleh. Never that.”

  Tovah wished she could believe him. She looked at Edward. “I don’t want to hurt him, I swear to you. But you have to trust me.”

  “Tovah, don’t do this,” Ben warned, but she yanked her hand from his anyway. Then from Spider’s.

  The instant she did, the terror and pain their mingled will had held at bay surged forward. It knocked her, clutching her gut and screaming, to her knees. Behind her she heard Ben and Spider doing the same. In the club, the screams rose to an insufferable pitch, and she clapped her hands over her ears.

  And then she got to her feet.

  She faced the boy. “You have to trust me.”

  The boy shook, his face white as bleached sheets, eyes two dark coins. The dream creatures in each of his hands rippled and writhed. Tovah stepped toward him. She began to shape.

  Spider had told her to shape a haven, and that’s what she did. Green grass, a butterfly, the sweetly spanning limbs of a shade tree. She shaped a haven for herself and the boy, in all his forms. Spider had said she could do it, and she did.

  She was sweating by the time it was half-finished, gritting her teeth with effort a moment after that. Never had she needed to work so hard to shape anything, not even in the beginning. For everything she shaped, she had to unshape something else. Even then, when it was done, she stood inside something as fragile as a soap bubble with the world outside pressing against it, trying to make it break.

  The boy looked better, not so pale, and he didn’t shake. The puppets in his hands dangled, ignored for the moment.

  “Where are we?”

  “I made this place for us,” Tovah said. “It’s a safe place. And any time you’re scared, you can come here, okay? You don’t have to…do what you did, before.”

  The boy looked around with wide eyes. “You did this for me? Even tho
ugh I did those bad things?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked back at her. “Why?”

  Tovah wanted to weep for this broken soul. “Because I know you didn’t mean to do it.”

  “Your friends wanted to kill me, didn’t they? Like Angie and Stan?” The boy looked at the dolls he still clutched.

  Grief at how Spider and Ben had tried to get her to take part in such a thing made her stutter. “Angie and Stan?”

  “That’s their names.” He shook the dolls and looked up at her. “They want to hurt me.”

  “They can’t hurt you here.”

  He nodded, looking around, then back at her. “What’s your name?”

  “Tovah.” She smiled, moving closer. Though outside the haven she could still feel the push and pull of a world on its edge, fighting with itself, she thought it might be fading. “What’s yours?”

  The boy looked shy and ducked his head. “Eddie.”

  “Well, Eddie—” Tovah stopped, stunned.

  They’d tried pushing against this boy, three on three, and had been unable to stop him. Because, though it had become clear the woman and the dogman were manifestations of his fear, there had been one piece missing. Not three on three.

  Three on four.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The boy had trusted Tovah for one minute, had given her his true name, and in that minute the world had ceased its shaking. He had stopped being afraid.

  “I remember,” he said slowly, looking at her with wonder. “Oh. I remember now!”

  The grass and sky and flowers made him want to dance, but he tipped his face to bright yellow sun and laughed instead. “But I’m okay here. I’m really okay! This isn’t the bad place. I’m not in the bad place anymore!”

  And he wasn’t, until the edges of the yellow sun began to turn black, like the time he’d held a leaf over the campfire to see what would happen to it. The edges had crisped brown, then black, and the smoke had started. He’d burned his fingers, crying out and sucking them, and his mother had given him a piece of ice and a sip of her soda.

  “Tovah?”

  Her face had gone long and sad, and she shook her head. “Oh, honey.”

  The witchwoman stood. The dogman stood. No longer dolls.

  “What’s happening?” The boy cried out. “What are you doing?”

  Tovah wiped her face and looked behind him. “You didn’t know, did you? Please. Tell me you didn’t know.”

  The boy turned. Tovah wasn’t talking to him, nor to her friends, but to Edward. He looked like Eddie’s dad had when Eddie did something stupid, like left the water running from the hose so it flooded the basement and ruined his dad’s new band saw in the workshop.

  “You told me to trust you, and this is what you do?” Edward jerked his chin around at the pretty place Tovah had made to keep them safe. “You’re no better than them!”

  He pointed to Tovah’s friends. She’d called one Spider, and Eddie remembered he’d really been a spider. The other one, Ben, had tried to fight the witchwoman whose name was Angie and been knocked to the sand, but Eddie had saved him. He’d saved the spider, too, opening the cage in which Angie had stuffed him.

  Why did they still want to hurt him?

  “Edward. Stop this.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Edward held out his hands as though he meant to hurt Tovah.

  “No!” Eddie cried. “Don’t do that! She’s nice!”

  Tovah turned and went to her knees, clutching Eddie’s shoulders. She looked deep into his eyes. “You stay here. No matter what happens, you stay here, okay?”

  She got up and faced the man again.

  Everything around them, all the nice things she’d made, began to disappear.

  Tovah couldn’t hold on to the haven. Not against Edward’s will. And it was his will, she realized with a stab of sorrow, not the boy’s. Not the woman’s, not the dogman’s. They were all the same. One man, split into pieces by what had been done to him as a child.

  She pulled out of the meadow and stood again on the mountain, black sand under her feet. Edward followed. His lip curled, showing white teeth. His features blurred, shifting, showing her each of the faces he’d worn. His body shaped and reshaped, taller, broader, leaner, longer. He shook with the changes, some coming so fast it was like watching a wink.

  “You don’t have to be afraid anymore,” she soothed.

  Spider came to one side of her. Ben to the other. But Tovah, unwilling to be bound between them again, stepped forward. Her motion drew Edward’s attention as swift as a rubber band snapping. His head whipped around, his face fixing solid for one moment. Something familiar in the lines of brow and jaw called to her, but the eyes were blank and dark, without emotion.

  “You are wrong,” he told her. “I am not afraid. Not that. Not ever again.”

  She began to shape again. Another haven. A safe place for her dream lover to rest. To be safe.

  Edward grabbed her by the upper arms and shoved her back. Her left leg twinged, then erupted into pain as her representation dissolved. She teetered for a moment, then hit the ground with a thud. She couldn’t even cry out, could only clutch at her limb and try to shape away the agony.

  “I’m sorry,” Edward told her. “But there is a reason why we dream what we dream. Your Spider was right about that. And I can’t let you take it away from me.”

  Edward needed no weapons. No bullet. No blade. He needed only the effort and force of his desire to cause harm, and he used it with as much skill and confidence as he’d used his charm and will to help, before.

  “Don’t do this!” Tovah cried, body twisting in the black sand.

  Edward stared down at her. “I have to.”

  Tovah cried out then, her protest as nothing to him. He hit Spider first, wrenching the older man to the ground and pinning him there with no more than a wave of his hand. Spider bucked against an unseen pressure, arms and legs flailing, but Edward paid no more attention to him than if he’d seen a beetle struggling on its back.

  Spider died.

  No blood or fanfare, just a sighing-out of breath. His eyes glazed and fingers twitched once, twice. Ben was at his side, grabbing up his hand, before Tovah could do more than take a step.

  “No,” she said conversationally, unable to believe what Edward had just done. She looked at her once-upon-a-time lover and couldn’t believe the hands she’d once let roam her body had done this savage thing.

  Edward lifted his hands, palms up, to stare at them as though they belonged to someone else. But in the next moment his expression hardened, full mouth twisting into a sneer. He looked to where Ben knelt next to Spider with his hands on Spider’s chest, compressing in the steady pattern Tovah recognized as CPR.

  “C’mon,” Ben muttered over and over while Tovah stood, frozen and useless. “Not you. C’mon, Spider. We need you.”

  She did need Spider, there was no question of that, but watching Ben perform a waking-world cure smacked Tovah’s face with its futility. She reached her hands toward her two friends and began to shape.

  “No, no. No.” Edward turned to her. “I can’t let you do that, Tovah.”

  “Fuck you!” she screamed, shaping. Pushing. Pulling.

  Edward shook his head. “Why couldn’t you just love me?”

  The world blurred, but not from being shaped. Acid tears filled her eyes and slipped, burning, down her cheeks. Tovah pushed harder, but Spider lay still and silent with Ben beside him.

  Tovah lurched to her knee, residual limb stuck out in front of her. She used her hands to push upward, seeking to get on her feet. At the last minute she shaped crutches, but they came through as no more than a crudely hobbled together conglomeration of sticks tied with twine. She used one to lever herself upright.

  Tovah hobbled to Ben and Spider and fell on her knee on the soft earth, neither green grass nor black sand now but brown, crumbling dirt mixed with rocks that cut her skin. She ignored it, concentrat
ing on Spider.

  “I can’t do it.” Ben’s voice had gone hoarse with his own tears. He gripped Spider’s limp hand and bent his head to it, shoulders bent. “He’s gone.”

  “No.”

  You’ll never get rid of me. I’ll be around for-fucking-ever.

  Tovah put her hand on Ben’s shoulder, urging him to look at her. “We can’t think that way.”

  There had been many moments shared between them, looks and words. Sometimes anger, always something more. Ben’s lips parted, but he said nothing.

  “Why me?” Tovah asked. “Why me, that first time?”

  Ben reached to touch her face. His hand cupped her cheek and drew her closer, the tips of his fingers curving just behind her ear. Tovah didn’t need the tug of his will to move her; she was already moving on her own.

  “Because I was lost,” Ben whispered, “and I needed someone to guide me. And you were there for me, Tovah. All this time, it’s always been you who kept me from being lost again.”

  She saw him kiss her, clearly. She felt the pressure of Ben’s mouth on hers. She tasted him. But it didn’t happen.

  A shadow loomed over them both and pitched them into darkness.

  “So it’s him.” Edward’s flat voice was like the slap of waves on a dark shore. “He’s the reason?”

  Tovah got to her feet, Ben a moment behind her. She faced Edward, took a step toward him. “I’m sorry, Edward.”

  “Why are you lying? You’re not sorry you love him! You’re not sorry one fucking bit!” Anguished, Edward fell to his knees in front of her. A vast black lake spread out behind him, endless and smooth as glass. “I was everything to you, everything you could ever want! Why not me?”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re a crazy fuck.” Ben snapped the words like individual punches, each one hitting Edward in someplace vulnerable.

  “I am not crazy.”

  Split into four, each unaware of the part the others played in the whole, how could he be anything resembling sane? Yet Tovah remembered feeling her mind fall apart and wanting so desperately for it not to be true that she’d denied it until it had nearly killed her.