The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  Yes, she probably should have told me a bit sooner, Lyse thought, as she hit the top of Echo Park Avenue and started down the backside of the hill. But so be it. What’s done is done.

  She passed through a tree-lined bohemia, tiny wood-slatted bungalows and Spanish-style stucco houses dotting the side of the hill like wildflowers. Her eyes followed the sloping curve of the stairways that were built into the hills, the concrete steps spiraling off through the trees before disappearing into the woodland. A few cars passed Lyse as she walked, but none going so fast they couldn’t see her coming and make allowances—and she did the same, stepping off into the grass, or hopping onto a curb to give the vehicles more room.

  An old Jeff Buckley tune came on—“Last Goodbye,” a song she loved—and she pressed the repeat button.

  Yes, she was that girl. When she was obsessed with a particular tune, she’d listen to it over and over and over until she’d worn out her love for it. Then she’d move on to her next musical obsession. This quality drove her best friend and business partner, Carole, insane. Lyse would be working in The Center of the Whorl, the nursery they co-owned back in Georgia, blasting a ridiculous rock song on repeat because she’d broken up with some jerk, and it would send Carole on the warpath.

  I told you not to date that asshole, her friend would say—and Lyse, who hated anyone saying I told you so, would just turn the stereo up louder.

  She’d spoken to Carole twice since Eleanora’s funeral. Once to tell her Eleanora had died and she needed to stay longer to sort out the estate. The last time they’d talked, she’d told Carole most of the truth: Lyse wasn’t coming back to Georgia anytime in the near future.

  Carole had taken the first call like a champ, worry for her friend apparent in her voice—the second call, well, she’d yelled at Lyse and then immediately apologized. Needless to say, she was not pleased with Lyse’s news.

  Carole had a little boy, and Bemo occupied all the time her friend didn’t spend at the nursery. Lyse understood that Carole wasn’t really mad at her, that she was just worried about losing her livelihood. What she didn’t know was that the coven had recently placed a large sum of money in Lyse’s account, and that a cashier’s check for her half of the business was already on its way to Carole’s bank in Athens—and it was double what Lyse’s share was actually worth.

  She hated that the Athens part of her life was over. It left a hole in her gut, an empty place that would never be filled, no matter how long she lived. With her normal existence gone, and Eleanora dead and buried, Lyse felt rootless. Add to this the fact that she’d ruined the only possible love connection she’d had in ages, and she felt more than lost. She felt alone.

  Weir, her friend Lizbeth’s ridiculously hot older brother, had been smitten with her until she’d behaved like a terrified child and demanded he give her “space.” She’d acted like an emotionally unavailable asshole who wasn’t ready to get involved in anything serious—which wasn’t really true. It was just with so many changes in her life, she felt overwhelmed. And as much as she wanted a relationship with him, she was just too scared of getting hurt, especially when she was already feeling emotionally bruised.

  It was ridiculous how intense their connection was. They hadn’t even had sex yet and she was kind of in love with the guy. There was just something special about Weir. Something that made him unlike any other man she’d ever dated. She desperately wanted to be with him: He was sexy and sweet and compassionate and smart . . . and it was only her fear of being hurt that had pushed him away. Like an idiot, she’d run her mouth off and screwed the whole thing up.

  She realized she’d been walking without paying attention to where she was going and was now almost to her favorite spot in all of Echo Park. It was the place she used to run away to when she was a teenager living with her great-aunt Eleanora and they’d have a fight. (It was only recently she’d learned the truth. That, in actuality, Eleanora was her grandmother, not her great-aunt.)

  She didn’t know why she found the hidden glen so glorious. Maybe it was because of the light, or maybe it was just the giant weeping willow tree that grew there. The one with the thick trunk and heavy boughs peppered with soft green leaves. Or possibly it was the rope swing lovingly looped around one of its branches, on the seat of which someone had written the loveliest of quotes: This Is Where Memories Are Made.

  Lyse had chosen to come to this particular spot because it was a happy place from her childhood and she wanted to sit on the swing, listen to music, and think about Eleanora.

  She wanted to remember her life before.

  Before. Whatever, exactly, that meant.

  She just wanted to get lost in the memories she’d created when Eleanora was alive . . . because maybe then she could forget that the woman she loved so dearly was dead.

  But dead doesn’t mean what it used to, Lyse thought as “Last Goodbye” cycled through her earbuds for the umpteenth time. Eleanora is here. Just not physically here.

  She reached the edge of the Elysian Park expansion and hopped over the metal guardrail separating the road from her hidden glen. Her mood was improving. She was looking forward to staring out at the city as she pumped her legs and made the swing go higher and higher.

  The view from up there was amazing, the little valley packed full of crumbling houses and twisting stairways and overgrown greenery. These were the hills Lyse liked to trek through best, the ones upon which Eleanora’s bungalow still stood. Though yuppies and aging hipsters peopled the area now, once upon a time Echo Park had belonged to the new bohemians. Sadly, what was once a home for all the liberal-thinking, left-wing-leaning communists, artists, and politicos of Los Angeles had changed its makeup completely. A restaurant at the bottom of Echo Park Avenue called Red Hill was the only reminder of what Echo Park had once been.

  Time marched forever onward—and it waited for no one. It hadn’t taken her long to realize the old neighborhood was changing again. Slowly but surely it was being absorbed by the rest of Los Angeles, and soon it would lose the last remnants of its bohemian charm.

  Oh, well, it was inevitable, Lyse thought as she made her way past the dirt and scrub grass that made up the floor of the glen, her eyes on the willow tree. Her heart lifted even though she couldn’t see the swing, which was obscured by low overhanging branches.

  Take us humans. We live and die and live and die on an endless loop. Nothing, not even love, lasts forever.

  As she reached the tree, Lyse stopped in her tracks. Someone had viciously cut one length of the thick rope anchoring the swing to its branch, so it half hung in the dirt. The same someone had taken a can of spray paint and covered the wooden plank in a dripping layer of black, obscuring the words that had made Lyse smile as a teenager—no matter how miserable she’d been on the inside.

  Lyse felt eyes scuttling along her back. She looked up and saw a lone house on the far side of the field. Lyse could just make out the shadow of a person standing on the porch. They seemed to be watching her. She wondered if they even knew the swing existed, or that some jerk had destroyed one of the most magical places in all of Echo Park.

  Lyse was heartsick. Seeing that kind of destruction in a place she loved so well made her livid with anger. She whipped around, hair flying, and began to walk away from the tree, Jeff Buckley wailing in her ears. Her anger drove her to walk faster and soon she was running, feet pounding the dirt as she tried to escape the rage rippling through her. She hit the edge of the field at top speed and, in her blind fury, almost slammed into the guardrail. But some sixth sense kicked in and she was able to stop herself before she cracked her shins on the metal.

  Breathing hard, she sat down on the guardrail’s precarious edge, her back to the road. Somewhere along the way, one of her earbuds had popped out and was hanging at her side, only a few inches from the dirt. She made a grab for it, but, like a pendulum, it swung away from her grasp.

  �
��Stop it!” she snapped at the earbud, feeling an irrational spike of rage toward the inanimate object.

  It swung back in her direction and this time she was able to scoop it up, jamming it back into her ear. Distracted, she was unaware of the figure standing behind her. It wasn’t until the person dropped a tentative hand on her shoulder that Lyse realized she was not alone. This, coupled with a well-developed fight-or-flight instinct, made her jump up off the guardrail, a scream lodged in her throat.

  “Who the what—” she cried, the words all jumbled in her mouth as she backed away, almost tripping over her own feet. The earbuds flew out of her ears in the confusion of the moment.

  It only took her a few seconds to realize this was a friend, not a foe.

  Her coven mate, Lizbeth, stood on the street side of the guardrail, staring back at her. She obviously hadn’t expected this kind of reaction from Lyse because she looked terrified.

  “You scared me,” Lyse said, feeling guilty for scaring the girl.

  Lizbeth frowned.

  “What’re you doing here?” Lyse continued, not expecting a verbal answer because Lizbeth was mute and could not reply in words.

  Lizbeth shrugged, pulling a small Moleskine notepad from the bib pocket of her faded cream overalls. With her scarf, purple thermal shirt, and a grungy orange-checked flannel looped around her waist, she looked like an escapee from a Pearl Jam music video. Lyse watched as the girl produced a violet-colored pen from another pocket and began to write.

  She ripped the page out of the notepad and handed it to Lyse:

  Following a dream. Are you okay?

  “I couldn’t stay in the bungalow. Alone . . .” Lyse said, trailing off as she folded the piece of paper and put it into her pants pocket. “I needed to escape.”

  Lizbeth nodded her understanding, and Lyse wondered if the girl had ever felt a similar urge to run away from her life and disappear into the shadows.

  “But then I came up here and someone had vandalized my fucking swing—”

  Lyse’s throat tightened. She gritted her teeth until her jaw ached and the urge to sob disappeared. Lizbeth, in her infinite patience, waited for Lyse to continue.

  “Sorry about that,” Lyse went on, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her hoodie. “You know the swing, right?”

  Lizbeth nodded, her long braid slapping against her back. Something about the girl’s eyes, the way they shone in the sunlight, pierced Lyse’s cracked heart and all her hard fought composure melted away. First the swing and now the innocent look of pity on Lizbeth’s face . . . it broke Lyse open. She felt hot tears burning the corners of her eyes, but she refused to wipe them away.

  “I killed someone last night,” she whispered, the need to confide her sin greater than she’d realized. “I mean, at least, I think I did . . . and now I’m not so sure.”

  She found no recrimination in Lizbeth’s eyes. Instead, the teenager reached out and wrapped her arms around Lyse’s shoulders, hugging her tight. They stood like that for a long time, the sun cresting over their heads as it lit up the whole of the L.A. River basin. From their vantage point high in the Echo Park hills, they did not see the water meander slowly down its man-made channel, or the 5 freeway come to life with the flow of morning rush-hour traffic.

  * * *

  Lyse was on edge as she made coffee in the stovetop espresso maker. She sat down at the round oak kitchen table to drink it and felt like thousands of pairs of eyes were watching her, spying on her comings and goings, so they could file away information about her every move. Maybe some giant computer somewhere was collecting all the info for further tabulation, turning her life into a series of ones and zeroes—which sounded rather comforting if it got rid of all those pesky emotions like guilt.

  Guilt. She was tortured by it. The image of her uncle David crushed and bleeding underneath the Lady of the Lake statue filled her mind. The way his fingers twitched, bloody and pale white in the moonlight; the sound of stone driving flesh and bone into asphalt, compressing a living being into mush. His scream had been the worst. Like an earwig tickling her eardrum, it wiggled around inside the labyrinth of her ear canal, repeating itself over and over again.

  She fought to push the image out of her brain, to banish it to some nether region of her cerebral cortex where she could pretend it didn’t exist—even though the whole strange night was, of course, burned into her gray matter for eternity. She had hoped that telling Lizbeth would make her feel better, but it had only done the opposite: She felt crushed underneath the weight of her own anxiety.

  Because even though there wasn’t a body and the statue was still intact, Lyse knew she didn’t dream her uncle’s death.

  The ringing phone cut into these morbid thoughts, throwing her a lifeline. Someone out in the real world was thinking of her—or, at the very least, was thinking of Eleanora—and wanted to connect.

  Lyse got up from the table, the scrape of her chair competing with the jangle of the telephone. She grasped the receiver of the avocado-green corded telephone that hung on the wall by the refrigerator and slid it from its hanging cradle.

  The jarring noise stopped midring.

  “Hello?”

  It was strange to stand there, an adult in the house where she’d spent her formative years. The last time she’d really used this phone, she’d hidden in the cupboard with the door closed, the cord wrapped around her finger as she’d tried to get some privacy. That was what it was like being a teenager: You felt constantly harassed, were always looking for an escape (especially from your own head), and you didn’t want anyone knowing your business. The adult version of Lyse was an entirely different person from the angsty teenager, and she found it hard to reconcile the two aspects of herself.

  “I just wanted to check in on you, make sure you were holding up okay?”

  Dev’s voice was warm and reassuring, and she could imagine her friend in the kitchen of the cozy Victorian she shared with her partner, Freddy, and their two daughters, holding a mug of something hot and autumn-spicy in her hand.

  “You must be psychic,” Lyse said, then realized the old adage actually kind of applied in this situation. Dev was a diviner, the tarot her divination tool of choice. Though Lyse hadn’t seen Dev at work, from what Eleanora and the other blood sisters said, she was very talented at her craft.

  “What’s wrong?” Dev asked, instantly picking up on the fact that something was amiss.

  Lyse twisted the rubbery telephone cord around her finger. She was desperate to pour out the horror of the previous night’s encounter with the man who claimed to be her long-lost uncle David. She’d tell her story—the kidnapping, the attack, the ghost causing the Lady of the Lake statue to topple and crush her uncle to death—and Dev’s maternal instincts would kick in and she’d tell Lyse it wasn’t her fault, that her uncle’s death was his own doing. And this would happen before she’d even told Dev the worst of it: that this horrible human being, this uncle she’d never known, was the murderer responsible for Eleanora’s death.

  Something he’d told her, wearing a look of glee on his hateful face, before he’d tried to murder her, too.

  “It’s not something . . .” She paused, unsure of how to put it. “I mean, uh, maybe I can come to you. We can talk? I don’t want to do it over the phone.”

  “Of course, come now,” Dev said. “Come whenever . . . I just want you to know you can tell me anything and I won’t judge. It’s always a safe space at the Montrose house.”

  Lyse wasn’t worried about being judged. She was worried about going to jail if a body ever turned up.

  “Give me an hour—I wanna shower and get dressed.”

  “Of course,” Dev replied, a breathless quality to her voice.

  “And get hold of the others,” Lyse added. “I’m really sorry, but I think we’re in way over our heads.”

  Even then she knew
the sentence was an understatement.

  Lyse

  The knock at the door scared her.

  Showered now and dressed in a flannel shirt and a pair of old acid-washed jeans, she made her way through the living room, finding that the sunlight streaming through the skylights gave the space a hazy, ephemeral quality. Like looking at the world though a layer of gauzy cotton fabric, or a camera lens greased with Vaseline in an attempt to blur the edges of an already dreamlike reality.

  A second knock on the door made Lyse jump. She stopped at the stone fireplace to scoop up the black wrought-iron poker and held the makeshift weapon aloft, feeling its heft in her hand. No matter who was at the door, she wanted to be prepared, and just holding the heavy poker made her feel more secure.

  Moving with as little sound as possible, she crossed the hardwood floor, reaching the front door just as another volley of knocks echoed through the bungalow. She stopped at the threshold, letting the abrasive knocking wash over her. Holding her breath, she hoisted the poker in front of her like a lance.

  “I have a weapon, but I don’t want to hurt you!” she yelled, her words ringing with what she hoped was authority.

  The banging stopped.

  Her heart, which was already beating faster than normal, started to hammer in staccato sixteenth notes—so fast Lyse began to feel light-headed. She waited for the person on the other side of the door to say something.

  There was only silence.

  She reached out with her free hand and unlocked the deadbolt. Her other arm was shaking from the effort of holding up the poker, so she let the weapon drop to her side—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t brandish it again at a moment’s notice.

  I’m an idiot, Lyse thought. I should go call the police. Only a vapid scream queen opens the door when there’s clearly something monstrous waiting on the other side.