Dreamseeker's Road

by Tom Deitz

  “Good for you. Uh…might I ask?”

  “The red-haired girl.”

  Another laugh: a little giddy, a little sad. And nervous.

  “What’s funny?” From the Elder.

  “This isn’t what I figured.”

  “So what did you figure? I wasn’t lookin’ for anything.”

  The Younger shrugged. “I dunno. High seriousness, I guess—to use that term you used to throw around. Not two guys hangin’ out.”

  “So why’d you do it, then? If you wanta get serious.”

  “’Cause…I wasn’t finished. ’Cause I never got to say good-bye. ’Cause I hated that the world lost what you’d have been.”

  “You’re a whole lot more! Doesn’t take a genius to see that.”

  “Shit!”

  “You’re too young to—oh, hell, no you’re not! I did at your age.”

  “I never heard you.”

  “I was careful.”

  Silence.

  “I could never have done this. Much as I’d have wanted to, if it had been you who died…early, I couldn’t have met you at the point of timeless eternity.”

  Silence.

  “I wrecked the Mustang—once. It’s fixed now.”

  “Still got the .308?”

  “Of course.”

  “College?”

  “Workin’ on it.”

  “Major?”

  “Anthropology. Minor in lit.”

  A yawn.

  The Younger’s arms prickled with alarm. “What happens when you sleep?”

  “I dunno. I’ve never slept while I was dead—yet.”

  The Younger drained his mead. He stared at the bottom, saw fire reflected there in a glaze of liquid that was more than honey wine.

  “Devlin ever get ’hold of you?”

  The Younger started. “John Devlin?”

  “The same.”

  “I got hold of him!”

  A look of alarm. “When?”

  “Couple of days ago. Why?”

  “Shit! He never got the letter!”

  “What letter?”

  A long sigh. “Time for some straight talk, kid.”

  “…Okay…”

  The Elder cleared his throat. “You’ve gotta know by now that there’s some weird stuff goin’ on ’round the folks’ place, right? Like, there’s an odd streak of ground back in the woods and something screwy about Bloody Bald, if you look at it a certain way…”

  “Yeah…but how’d you know that I know?”

  “’Cause you’re too much like me—all that crazy Irish blood, I guess. I mean, Dev just looked at me and knew.”

  “So what’s the deal?”

  “Basically that I told him a lot of stuff and he hinted at a couple of things, and I got to thinkin’ about it, and decided that if I’d found out all that, you would too.

  But I’d also figured out it was dangerous, so I—I dunno—I had this funny feelin’ I might not come back from where I was, so I wrote ole John a letter and told him to keep an eye on you, and tell you whatever he thought might be good for you to know, if he thought you oughta know anything. Had it in my pocket when—”

  “What?”

  “They didn’t find it, did they? Or didn’t want to puzzle out the pieces.”

  “Guess not. He didn’t mention it, anyway.”

  “He would’ve.”

  “So…?”

  A sigh. “Basically I was scared you’d get tangled up in some stuff I was afraid to fool with, and it just didn’t seem like stuff you could deal with alone.”

  The Younger fidgeted. “Yeah, well, I did, I guess—I mean, that’s what all this is: how I got here, and all. But I didn’t get into it alone. That’s where we’re different, you and me: you had to go solo. I had friends. Actually, there’s a bunch of folks who at least know something.”

  “More’n you think, if what Devlin told me’s true.”

  “Too bad about the letter, though. Prob’ly would’ve changed some things.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Dev’s a good man. You can trust him.”

  “Kinda thought so.”

  “Think of him as a surrogate me. Don’t be afraid to talk to him. I wasn’t.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “So…anything else buggin’ you?”

  A shrug. “School, friends…some stuff about the World Walls.”

  “World Walls?”

  “Sorry. I figured you knew.”

  Stone grated. Grit trickled down from the dome. “Speakin’ of walls…”

  “Crap,” the Younger groaned. “That must be a hint.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Guess I can either split now or stay forever.”

  “Go for number one. The world needs you. I love you, but—I don’t need you.” A pause, a frown, then: “No, that’s wrong. I can’t. There’s a difference.”

  “So it’s over?”

  “For this time and place. Not forever.”

  The Younger rose. “So what do I do now?”

  “You say good-bye, we hug each other like crazy bears, you go out the door, and time starts up again—I guess.”

  “Like the Feast with the Head of Bran?”

  “Uh…you got me there.”

  “The Mabinogion.”

  “Never got that far. It was next. ’Cept there was no next.”

  “Bran was a king of mythic Wales and he and his brothers fought a war with Ireland; Bran was killed and beheaded, only his head didn’t die, and his buddies feasted with it for eighty years at Harlech, and as long as the outside door stayed closed, no one remembered their sorrow.”

  “Will you remember?”

  A shrug. A wry smile. “I don’t know. I didn’t know what’d happen when I started down the road that brought me here.”

  “Do you want to remember?”

  “I want to remember that you’re a good man, that I owe you everything that’s good in me, that you died before your time—and that I finally had a chance to say good-bye.”

  “Those are good things to remember and be remembered for,” the Elder smiled. “And you’re probably the one who’s gonna have to close things down.” He yawned again.

  They hugged long and deep and powerfully, without self-consciousness, guilt, or fear.

  “You really are shorter than you’re s’posed to be,” the Younger smirked.

  “Not as tall as I wanted, that’s for sure,” the Elder growled—and stretched out on the slab.

  “’G-night.”

  “Sleep tight!”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  “It’s not them I’m concerned about!”

  “Love you, man.”

  “Never doubt it!”

  And with that, David set his jaw, and walked to the white stone door.

  It swung open at his touch. Cold roared in. Night rose above.

  Chapter XXV: The Wake

  (Sullivan Cove, Georgia—the Dreamtime—’twixt midnight and dawn)

  The cat was the main thing keeping him sane, Alec decided. He’d been stroking its silky orange fur for what seemed like hours, and it had been purring blithely along the whole nerve-racking while. At the moment it sprawled across his lap with its chin and one forepaw athwart his left thigh, where he sat cross-legged on the cold hillside turf of what resembled a war between the familiar Sullivan Cove he’d been hanging out in all his life and an over-the-top production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung—complete with roiling lightning-lit clouds, flickering torches, and looming burial mounds. For that matter, it wasn’t that far off from the background of the Warner Brothers cartoon “What’s Opera, Doc?” that Aikin had been so keen to emulate less than a week gone by, which had engendered his Elmer Fudd costume.

  —Which recollection was another much-needed distraction, like Eva the enfield/cat.

  Trouble was, while the steady “burr” of Eva’s contentment thrumming through his thighs was almost hypnotically relaxing, every
flash of lightning made him tense up again, so that the beast was at best able to manage a holding action against the blind panic that had been hovering near ever since David had marched up that ridiculous hill.

  Damn him! Damn the hill! Damn it bloody all!

  Right from the start, he’d had to fight the urge to follow his obviously fey buddy, an impulse not alleviated when he’d seen David fumble beside the door, grab something that had flashed in the torchlight like metal, and lie down—which put him out of view even from horseback, and also, apparently, was the cue the Morrigu had been seeking to allow him and Liz to dismount.

  They had: silent as pallbearers and as sober-faced. Liz had said nothing at all, simply folded herself down close beside him, and taken the hand that wasn’t occupied combing fur. The Morrigu flanked him to the left, face impassive, though she’d been watching the eastern sky with increasing frequency of late. No one had spoken since they’d staked out their respective territories. Liz’s hand was cold.

  Alec suddenly felt as though he would explode if something didn’t change. Waiting was not a thing he did well anyway—in common with David—and enduring it in what was in some sense a dreamworld was not a notion he wanted to contemplate, since he feared it really could stretch, objectively at least, forever. More to the point, he absolutely did not want to fret about David even one second longer. He’d therefore focus on another demon entirely.

  “Uh—” he began, almost surprised to find his words audible in a place where the raw elements of reality were so overwhelming, yet so mutable. “Uh—” he dared once more, to the Morrigu, “I hate to ask this…but is there anything we can do about the World Wall thing? Assuming those folks Aik went off with recover the ulunsuti, that is. I mean, we only found out it was messing ’em up a couple of hours ago, and we’ve been busy ever since…”

  The Morrigu scowled. Her jaw went tight, and Alec figured he was in for a tongue-lashing. Instead, she sighed and shrugged, for that moment more human than Faery.

  “Waiting is no joy,” she said tersely. “Nor do I blame you for seeking to divert your thoughts from your friend. But to answer your question: I know little about the oracular stone, and little more about the World Walls, save that they simply are. At times they are as transparent to us as air is to you, at others they are charged with Power, as rain and fog suffuse air yet neither negate nor change its intrinsic nature. Sometimes, in fact, they are so thick with Power that even the mighty of us cannot pierce them, either with the Sight, our bodies, or our art.”

  She paused to check the east, then continued. “No one will argue, however, that they have weakened in places—mostly where Iron lies deep and long in your World. And now we find that the gates wrought by the oracular stone can weaken them as well. Will they heal? Perhaps…given time. Certainly they have done so before, with new stuff flowing into their flaws like flesh overgrowing a wound. Yet we can neither speed that process nor hinder it. As for the oracular stone, my understanding of it is that it serves mostly to manipulate intangible forces: the soul, the mind, time—such things as that. A knife may make a wound, after all, but it cannot close one; even so the stone may create a rift in the World Walls but not repair it, so it seems to me. Your wisest course, then, should you recover it, is not to use it again in such a way as to weaken the World Walls more.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” Alec agreed. And would have said more, had not the whole eastern horizon suddenly strobed with a flash of blue-white lightning.

  He inhaled sharply, as did Liz. The bolt left yellow afterimages like a colossal tree reaching from the mountainous horizon halfway across the writhing sky. It took an instant to realize that the bolt had jagged backward: a solid trunk of white fire at the earth, fanning out like limbs into the heavens.

  It was slow in withering, too, for the ridges at its root continued to flare and flicker with ghostly blue sparks, as though the land there was wrought of dark velvet that had caught fire and was slowly burning through, revealing an eerie pink-blue nothing like a black light as big as the world.

  The Morrigu sat bolt upright, eyes wide, face shadowed in indigo from that hell glow. She looked, Alec thought, very alarmed indeed.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded. Liz’s grip tightened on his hand. The cat hissed and dug in its claws. He ignored it.

  “I have been a fool!” the Faery snapped. “I should never have let him come here, for once he entered the Realm of the Dreaming Dead, time runs at its own pace, and his time will neither be ours nor that of the rest of this World. Oh, I warned him, I know,” she went on vehemently. “I told him that if we did not conclude our business tonight we would be lost—still, I should have given him some means to know our time, but it has been long and long since I walked the Crimson Road, and now dawn has found the borders and will soon devour all—”

  “But we can still take the…Crimson Road back to our World, right?” Liz broke in.

  “Wrong! Dawn will dissolve this World and sever the Crimson Road from the Tracks in your World, my World, and this World—all three—not to be rejoined until those forces that flow between the Worlds realign so as to recall it from the nothingness it will become—which will not occur until another year has died. In the meantime, the Road will continue—but nothing above, beneath, around, or upon it will remain, for there will be nowhere to be— Oh, it is too hard to explain in words you will understand, when even the mighty of Faerie scarce comprehend it!”

  “So,” Alec said, “the bottom line is that we’ve gotta split real soon.”

  “Not without David!” Liz protested, rising and turning to glare at the barrow-mound.

  Alec mirrored her reaction. Did it look brighter up there he wondered? Were highlights of violet fire dancing upon it, as though roof and wall and lintel were limned by lasers?

  “If he does not appear very soon, we will have no choice,” the Morrigu informed them flatly.

  “And of course you didn’t tell him this would happen!” Liz flared. “He’d never have come here if he’d known there’d be this much risk!”

  “It would not have mattered,” the Morrigu countered. “His anger—and desire—were mightier than you know. And tonight—this night of all nights—the Road would have reached out to him. The best we could do was accompany him. At least we were able to ensure that he arrived with his mind intact. Many have not. Sometimes I think that is what drove my sisters mad: having spent too much time escorting the death-obsessed down the Crimson Road. I—”

  She did not finish, for the world went blue-white again. The air throbbed with infrasound thunder as the sky tree reerupted, this time with twigs to fill the gaps ’twixt its branches. The flickering spread along the horizon to totally embrace the east. The mountains that had first sustained it grew even more tenuous. Some had raveled away.

  The Morrigu joined them afoot, as wired as Alec had ever seen someone from Faerie. “Maybe there is time,” she muttered. “Maybe!”

  “For what?” From Liz.

  “To flee! To save eight lives, if not nine!”

  “Not without David,” Alec insisted. “He went after Aik, and helped me. I can’t desert him!”

  The Morrigu glared at them, then at the sky. The lightning was constant now, but with each stroke, more phantom twigs stretched farther across the heavens, and more mountains caught fire. The gap from which it rose was a pulsing lake of blue-pink luminescence.

  A horse whickered, threatening to bolt. The Morrigu calmed it with a Word. Already she was striding that way.

  “Goddamn you!” Alec spat, tossing the cat from his lap and stomping after her, on the vague assumption he could actually restrain someone as Powerful as she.

  “No!” Liz shouted. Then: “Oh, God, there he is!”

  Alec whirled around. Liz was already running. He paced her shadow, overtaking her halfway up, as they both strove to reach that figure who, scant seconds before, had appeared in the sudden gap between the barrow’s stone portal and one massive doorjamb,
looking like nothing so much as a wraith escaped from ultimate night. It—David—had stared out, stepped forward—and collapsed, lost, for the nonce, to sight.

  The ground shook again. Alec was flung forward onto all fours, in which mode he scrambled the remaining yards to the summit. Liz was right beside him, as was the cat. Dimly—distantly—he heard the trampling of hooves, the neighing of frightened horses, and the Morrigu screaming at them from the base of the hill: “Fools!”

  Alec ignored her. Reality had tunneled down to instinct and reflex and the single desire to drag his best friend to his feet and get as far as they could as fast as they could and trust luck, which seemed so far to be their ally, to see them through.

  And then he was off the turf and onto the quarter arc of pavement before the now-closed door, and Liz was with him, and they were kneeling by David’s either side, where he sprawled facedown, shirtless and barefoot upon those cold, trembling flagstones, while the whole world growled and groaned as the tectonic plates of dreamstuff ground each other to glowing dust.

  “Is he…?” Alec panted, reaching for David’s nearside arm to hoist him up.

  “Thank God, no,” Liz sighed, as she followed his example. And then he caught the slight rise and fall of his buddy’s shoulders. Yet that breathing was shallow—so shallow—and escaping in something between a gasp and a moan.

  “Fools…fools…fools…” came the Morrigu’s frantic chant—or was that merely an echo of her earlier cries, or thunder playing mimic from cosmic spite?

  Somehow they got David onto his knees. A nod at Liz, a jerk, and they wrested him to his feet. He swayed there unsteadily. His eyes were closed, though his lids twitched constantly. His breathing was better, however, and his lips worked. Between gasps, he managed to rasp out what might have been “…weak.”

  “Yeah, man, I know,” Alec gritted, as he dragged his friend forward. “C’mon, Davy,” Liz urged in turn. “Oh, Davy, come on—you’ve gotta! I know you’re weak, but we’ve gotta get outta here, gotta go just a little farther.”

  “Yeah,” Alec took up as they reached the edge of the slope and started down.

  The ground promptly shook once more, tumbling them into a jumble of arms and legs a dozen yards down the hill. When Alec righted himself, it was to see the fire-tree in the east rear up again—this time with a crackling roar and the scent of ozone—and the far more welcome sight of the Morrigu on horseback charging toward them with two other mounts in tow. The third was nowhere around. Likely she had shied.