by Kit Alloway
“I’m not a child. I might be stupid, but I’m not a child.”
“You aren’t stupid,” Whim told her.
“Yeah, I am,” she said. She reached for Whim’s tablet, lying on the coffee table, and Deloise handed it to her. “But I’m not a complete idiot.”
Winsor struggled to type. Del offered to help, but Winsor declined. She was quite determined to do whatever she was doing by herself.
“There,” she said, five minutes later. She offered the tablet to Josh. “Call Phil.”
She’d navigated to a website for a business called the Mad White Hatter, owned by someone named Phil.
Josh glanced at Will, who shrugged. “Winsor, did this guy work on your computer at some point?”
“No,” she said. “I met him.”
“Where?” Will asked.
Winsor frowned. Her eyes weren’t focusing, but she said in a low, rough voice, “In the canister.”
All motion in the room stopped.
“In the canister?” Whim asked.
“Phil’s my friend,” Winsor told him.
While they were processing that, Will pulled out his phone and dialed the number on the website.
“Hello, Mad White Hatter,” a man said.
“Hi, my name is Will Kansas. I think you might know a friend of mine, Winsor Avish…”
“Winsor? Of course! Of course I know Winsor.”
“Oh,” Will said, startled. “Um, we’re having a little computer problem and she said you might be able to help.”
“Absolutely. Come right over. Do you need the address?”
* * *
They took Whim’s baby-blue Lincoln Town Car to Phil’s house. Although Will hated the way Whim drove even more than he hated the way Josh drove, Winsor liked the comfy leather seats. She fell asleep as soon as they were out of the driveway.
Josh and Will sat in the backseat and held hands.
I’m so glad we made up before all of this started, Will thought. If the World is going to end, I want to be by her side when it happens.
Phil lived surprisingly close by. Or maybe not so surprisingly. Snitch and Gloves had burst out of the Dream through the archway in the Avish-Weaver house’s basement and then made their way on foot toward Josh’s mother’s cabin, where there was an archway to let them back into Feodor’s universe. Along the way, they’d gathered souls for Feodor. One of the souls they nabbed had been Winsor’s.
Apparently another had been Phil’s.
A smiling woman met them at the door of a cookie-cutter mini-mansion. The silver bangles around her wrists jangled as she reached for Winsor’s hands.
“Winsor,” she said, “I’m so glad to meet you. Phil has said nothing but wonderful things about you.”
Winsor tugged her hands away, refusing to meet the woman’s eyes. “Who are you?”
“I’m Phil’s wife, Donisha. Please, come in.”
Will wasn’t sure why Winsor didn’t know who Donisha was, but Donisha seemed unsurprised by Winsor’s condition and uninsulted by her diminished manners. She led them through an intimidatingly clean formal living room into a more casual TV room, where a short, round, black man in flannel pajamas lay in a hospital bed.
“Winsor!” he said, looking up from a laptop. “I’m so happy you called! Come here, come here!”
Winsor grew shy, but she navigated her wheelchair over to the side of the bed.
“I’m gonna give you a really lousy hug,” Phil said, “because I can’t get out of this bed yet. But I’ll try.”
He rolled onto his side and hugged Winsor, and she seemed to relax then, and closed her eyes briefly.
“Hey, I know that smile,” Phil said as he released her. “Are these your friends? Introduce me.”
They ended up introducing themselves while Winsor sat silently beside Phil. He gestured to the television, which was showing a tear in the Veil that had just opened up over Minsk.
“Pretty wild, eh? It’s like the world’s coming to an end.”
Will and Josh exchanged glances, but neither of them told Phil how right he was.
“Did Winsor tell you about me?” Phil asked. “You all look like you have no idea what’s going on.”
“We have no idea what’s going on,” Whim affirmed. “You guys met in the canister?”
“The canister? I don’t know anything about a canister. We met while we were both in comas.” Phil pushed his glasses up his nose. “I can’t really explain it. If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t believe it. But somehow we were all part of the same dream.”
“What kind of dream?” Whim asked, a little suspiciously.
Will couldn’t fault Whim’s big brother instincts, but he already liked Phil. And he liked that Winsor liked Phil.
“We were living on the same street,” Phil said. “We were neighbors. It was summer, a long summer, and hot…”
He trailed off, but Winsor nodded.
“It really wasn’t that exciting,” Phil said. “We just lived on this street and had a lot of cookouts. When I woke up I thought I must have imagined it. Then Sam called me and said he’d had a dream with me in it, and I realized it had happened, somehow or other.”
“Sam?” Whim asked. “That weirdo who keeps showing up at our house?”
Phil winced. “I told him that was a bad idea. Sam’s a little desperate.” He smiled at Winsor. “Somebody won’t talk to him.”
Whim shook his head explosively, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Before he could start bombarding his sister with questions, Will said, “We’re glad you’re okay, Phil.”
“Yeah, me, too. I’m weak as a kitten, but my mind’s mostly okay. Still can’t remember my e-mail password, though.” His gaze fell on Winsor again, and Will saw his lips tighten. Phil knew Winsor’s brain hadn’t come back okay.
“What’s this you need my help with?” he asked her.
Winsor rubbed her temple. “I don’t remember … Whim?”
“I’ve got it, Winny,” Whim told her. “We need to find someone, but all we have is the name of someone he’s been talking to. Winsor thought maybe you could hack into the other guy’s e-mail account and find something that would help.”
“The man we’re looking for is my grandfather,” Josh put in. “He’s got Alzheimer’s, and he’s been missing for the last three months. We’re just trying to find him. We … we miss him so much.”
Josh was the worst actress who ever lived. Will cringed when she started pretending to cry by rubbing at her eyes and frowning.
Phil tried to keep a straight face and couldn’t.
“Darling,” he said, “I know I just got out of a coma, but I’m not quite stupid enough to fall for that.”
“Don’t tell lies, Josh,” Whim scolded. “You aren’t good at it.”
“Who’s this guy you’re trying to find?” Phil asked, opening his laptop.
“His name’s Peregrine Borgenicht,” Will said. “And he has been missing for three months. We know he’s been in contact with someone named Aurek Trembuline.”
“Are you sure about those names? They sound made up,” Phil muttered. “Have you reported him missing?”
“Yeah,” Will said, before Josh could try to lie. “They have no leads.”
Even as he typed, Phil said, “Does he really have Alzheimer’s?”
“Uh, no,” Josh admitted. “But he did recently lose his left hand.”
“So for all you know, he’s just taking a long vacation to get used to being a righty.”
Whim laughed. “That’s the best-case scenario.”
His words didn’t seem to convince Phil, who stopped typing. “Somebody clue me in,” he said. “I don’t just break into people’s personal lives for fun, not even for my friends.”
It was Winsor who answered, while Will and Josh silently debated how much to tell Phil. She simply pointed to the TV and said, “That’s his fault.”
“That?” Phil echoed. “Nobody even knows what that is.”
/>
“We do,” Josh said. “And yes, we think that Peregrine caused … what’s going on.”
“What is going on?”
No one answered that, not even Whim.
“Winsor, I love you, kiddo, but you’ve got to realize that this looks a little far-fetched from my point of view.”
Winsor pushed her hair out of her face. Her gaze was unfocused, and Will wasn’t even certain she’d heard Phil until she said, “I didn’t know you were married.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Phil admitted, the lines in his face relaxing.
“There’s other stuff,” Winsor said. “Stuff you don’t know about me.”
She looked up at him then, and her eyes were as clear as Will had seen them since she woke up.
Phil let out a long, slow breath. “Spell those names for me.”
While he was working, the doorbell rang, and Will heard Donisha go to answer it. He also saw Phil’s eyes flick toward the living room, not so much curiously as furtively.
A walker hit the foyer floor.
Will looked at Josh with alarm, but she didn’t seem to have put the clues together yet. Only when Sam appeared in the living room and Winsor moaned did Josh realize something was wrong.
“Winsor,” Sam said desperately. He looked even worse than he had when he came to the house, thin to the point of frailty, his knuckles knotty around the walker.
“No, no,” Winsor whispered. She looked plaintively at Phil.
“I’m sorry,” Phil said. “I had to. He’s miserable.”
Winsor began breathing rapidly, and Whim inserted himself between her and Sam. “That’s close enough,” Whim said, holding up a hand.
“Winsor,” Sam said again. “Please, please just talk to me. Just for five minutes, and then if you never want to hear from me again you won’t have to.”
“No,” Winsor whispered, and she tried to hide behind her dark hair by pulling clumps of it over her face.
“Please, sweetheart,” Sam said, tears in his eyes, and suddenly Will understood everything.
“Let him talk to her, Whim.”
Whim gave Will a look that said, You’re crazy.
“He won’t hurt her,” Will insisted. “He’s in love with her.”
Whim did a double take. “What?”
“In the coma,” Sam said, speaking to Whim for the first time. “We met in the coma.”
“They fell in love while the three of them shared that dream,” Will said.
“The four of us,” Sam corrected. “But—Divya didn’t wake up.”
At the name, Winsor began sobbing. Phil put a comforting hand on her back, but Sam, unable to get past Whim, let go of his walker and fell to his knees. He crawled toward Winsor.
“Oh, God,” Whim said, and he looked embarrassed and stepped to the side. “Come on, dude. You don’t have to crawl on the floor.”
But Sam had already made it to Winsor’s wheelchair and was embracing her thin legs. “Please, please,” he kept whispering.
“Don’t look at me,” Winsor said. “I’m—I’m not—”
“You’re beautiful,” Sam told her.
“I’m not like I was!” she cried. “I’m weak and … stupid. I get mad and I don’t even know why. I can’t—I used to be—I’m not what I was.”
“I don’t care,” Sam said. “I’m not, either.”
“But you’re still…”
“You’re still you,” he said. “And I still love you.”
He swept the hair out of her eyes with a tender hand and smiled when he could see her face again. Winsor kept crying, her jaw trembling, but she gave herself an awkward push forward and slid out of her wheelchair and into Sam’s arms.
Josh leaned her head on Will’s shoulder and hugged one of his arms. Phil wiped tears from his eyes.
“This is turning out to be the weirdest day of my life,” Whim said, and threw himself onto the couch.
It took some maneuvering, but Will and Josh got both Winsor and Sam onto a sofa in the formal living room and left them to cry and kiss and whisper to each other in relative privacy. In the TV room, Whim was stretched out on the couch as if he’d just swooned, and Phil was typing away.
“That makes me happy,” he told Josh and Will. “Seeing the two of them together again—that makes me very happy.”
It made Will happy, too. He’d never seen Winsor happy before; maybe now he would.
If the World didn’t end.
“Okay,” Phil said, sometime later. “It looks like your friend Peregrine is using a computer in a town called Scleron.”
“Scleron?” Will asked. “Where is that?”
“It’s in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Eight, ten hours from here. The Internet connection is registered to a trailer. Peregrine doesn’t own it, but when I ran a property search on him, I found some land he owns about forty miles outside Scleron, way up in the mountains. Look.”
He showed them a satellite image. All Will could see was treetops, but Phil pointed to a dark ring. “See this? That’s some kind of building.”
“So whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it there,” Josh said, “and then renting a place in town.”
“This image is from three weeks ago, though,” Phil said. “The most recent images look like this.” He clicked his mouse.
“Holy shit,” Josh said, her voice breathy.
A small city appeared to have grown right out of the mountains.
“Now, I realize I’ve recently experienced a brain injury,” Phil said, “but I’m still pretty sure that no construction company on earth can build something like that in three weeks.”
“Oh my God,” Josh whispered. “It’s just like Haley said.”
The city in the mountains hadn’t been built.
It had been dreamt.
Thirty−four
Haley was with Mirren in her bedroom when she got the call. He couldn’t make out the words, but he recognized Feodor’s tenor.
Mirren held her hand over the phone’s mic. “They found Peregrine.”
Haley tried to smile, but all he felt was dread. He listened to Mirren talk, knowing that the minutes were counting down to when he’d have to leave her.
And he honestly didn’t know if he’d see her again.
He went into the bathroom to wash his face. Cold water had always been his favorite method for washing off other people’s energies, and there was a lot of that flying around these days.
But when he glanced at the mirror, it wasn’t his face he saw.
It was Ian’s.
Haley was afraid to look away. He lowered his eyes slowly, too slowly—he caught a glimpse of Ian’s mouth spreading into a wide, joyless grin.
Trembling, he backed out of the bathroom. As he closed the door, he thought he heard Ian chuckle.
I’m going crazy, Haley thought. I’m losing it. Forget, forget, forget …
Something had happened in the basement with Josh, something he didn’t understand. He couldn’t remember anything from that day, but since then, he hadn’t caught a single glimpse of the future. When he tried to look forward, he got panicky and—more curiously—distracted. He couldn’t focus.
During “Trembuline’s thing,” he had asked: What happened in the basement?
But, although the love energy infusing his chest had filled him with peace, his question had gone unanswered. His thoughts kept slipping away—to how good Mirren’s aura felt beside his, how calming Will’s voice was, how bad Whim’s broken nose looked.
He’d never felt like this before. And he kept thinking he saw Ian—just around the corner, in the shadows in his bedroom, ducking through the back door the instant before Haley reached the kitchen.
Why would I be seeing Ian?
He didn’t know. In the eight months since Ian’s spirit had died, Haley had barely thought about him. Even when he was in the Death universe, it had never occurred to him to look for Ian.
Haley wandered like a sleepwalker back in
to Mirren’s bedroom, a simple farmhouse bedroom with cotton curtains on the windows and a patchwork quilt on the bed. She’d hung up the phone and was making a list on a notepad. “We need to go over to Feodor’s. But we need to go shopping first.”
“Okay,” Haley said, and his bloodless tone must have alerted Mirren that something was wrong, because she stood up from the desk.
“Haley? You’re shaking.”
He opened his mouth to apologize, but the word that came out was, “Forget…”
“Haley?” Mirren said again, and she sounded frightened this time. “Come back to me, Haley. You’re safe. You can come back here.”
When his vision cleared, he said, “I have to go, and you have to stay here.”
She knew exactly what he meant. He could see it in the subdued glow of her aura. With a gentle hand, she guided him to sit down on her bed.
“I have to stay here to oversee the VHAGs. That’s what I heard yesterday, when we did Trembuline’s thing.”
“I don’t know if I’ll see you again,” Haley told her.
She took a deep breath. “You don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?”
“I don’t know. Something is stopping me from seeing…”
Forget, forget, forget …
“What were we talking about?” he asked.
Mirren pushed his hair back so she could press her palm to his forehead. When she dropped her hand, it was almost with regret. “You haven’t been right since you and Josh tried to see the future.”
“I don’t feel right.”
“I would tell you not to go, but…” She tugged her earlobe, a mannerism that her aunt hated but Haley found adorable. “Haley, Feodor made a point just now with which I’m reluctantly forced to agree. Josh has already refused to kill Peregrine once. I stood by her and understood her reasoning, but I’m afraid that if she faces him again, she’ll make the same decision. We can’t indulge her pacifism a second time—not when thousands of people have already died.” Mirren’s aura was tinged with yellow and red determination, but an anxious pale blue suffused her third chakra. “Feodor has devised a … plan to kill Peregrine. I hate to go behind Josh’s back, especially when she has been such a good friend to me, but I don’t have a better idea. Peregrine must die, and maybe in the end Josh will be grateful she didn’t have to be the one to make that call.”
