The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  “Yes, baby?” Dev whispered.

  “Tell Grammie they wanna talk to her.”

  “I will, sweetheart. Now let me go let Grammie in . . .”

  “Okay.” And like a sleepwalker, Marji returned to her bed, leaving the door wide open behind her.

  Dev waited until she could hear the rustle of Marji climbing back under the comforter, and then she continued down the stairs. She yawned as she hit the bottom step, her brain on autopilot. It didn’t help that she’d barely slept the previous night, having been on guard duty in the Mucho Man Cave until three in the morning. Freddy had graciously called in sick to work in order to take over for her—but as exhausted as she’d been, sleep had proved elusive.

  And now a bunch of little old dead ladies were using her elder daughter as a messenger service. Could her life get any more bizarre?

  Dev pulled her robe tight around her middle as she padded through the sitting room, shivering a little in the chilly morning air. The heat was on, she could hear the gentle thrum of the compressor, but because heat rose, it was always warmer in the upstairs bedrooms than it was in the rest of the house.

  There was a quiet comfort in being surrounded by the everyday familiar. The creaky old Victorian was like a tried-and-true friend—she knew every nook and cranny in the place, had played hide-and-seek with her sisters in all of the drafty high-ceilinged rooms, had cried herself to sleep in what was now Marji’s room when the boy she liked in middle school wouldn’t go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with her.

  Its walls were privy to all of her sorrows and joys, from her idyllic childhood to the excitement of falling in love with Freddy to the birth of her two precious daughters. It was a part of who she was—in fact, was a part of each Montrose woman who had lived and died there before her.

  “Coming,” she called out softly as she crossed to the front door and looked through the peephole.

  She blinked as her sister’s patrician face came into view, features distorted as if Dev were observing her through a fish-eye lens. Dev was reassured beyond measure to see her tiny mother standing just beside Delilah, both women with overnight bags at their feet. She sighed with relief and reached down to undo the chain. She threw back the deadbolt and opened the door.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Dev said, crossing the threshold and enfolding both women in her arms. They hugged in silence, enjoying the familial connection of being with people who loved you unconditionally no matter what. “Come in, come in.”

  She picked up her mother’s brown-and-mauve floral carpetbag, gesturing for them to follow her inside. Her mother, who was barely five feet tall, was a smaller, more compact version of Dev. She wore her gray hair in a chin-length bob, but it was so thick that it poofed out around her cheeks like a puffin’s chest. She wore a pair of round spectacles on a silver length of chain that hung from her neck, holding them up to her eyes whenever she needed to read something, but otherwise ignoring them.

  “It’s just like a snapshot,” her mother said as she stepped into the sitting room, her eyes roving from the dark oak love seat and settee to the antique empire rolltop desk to the Victorian green-and-beige tiles that lined the fireplace, offsetting the polished glow of the thick wooden mantel. “It never changes.”

  “And that’s why we like it,” Dev said, nodding as they passed through the wooden doorway leading into the kitchen.

  “But do we really like it that way?” Delilah asked, half jokingly.

  She was the youngest of Dev’s sisters and the free spirit of their already very bohemian family. She’d joined the Peace Corps, traveled all over South America, and then taught English at a secondary school for girls in Rwanda. She’d never planted roots anywhere, was constantly in motion, never settling, always off on another adventure.

  “I mean,” Delilah continued, removing her green knit cap and revealing an inch of gold-blond stubble. “I love the old place. Don’t get me wrong. I’d just never want to be tied down to it indefinitely.”

  Delilah had been in the middle of her yearly visit with their parents when Dev had called for backup. She was happy to have her youngest sibling there to help, but older sister and baby sister were about as different as two people could be.

  “I’m not being mean, Dev,” Delilah added, realizing by Dev’s silence she’d offended her older sibling. “You know I love the house. I really do. I’m just not cut out for a sedentary existence.”

  Dev knew she shouldn’t take umbrage at the word sedentary, but it rankled a little bit. Especially coming from her baby sister. She opened her mouth to reply and was interrupted by the pounding of small feet on the stairs. With a sharp squeal of happiness, Ginny burst into the kitchen, brimming with excitement at seeing her grammie and aunt Delilah.

  “Grammie, Grammie, Grammie,” Ginny cooed as she danced around the room. She was so full of energy that it made Dev tired just watching her. “You’re here! I wanna show you my ant farm—”

  Ginny took her grammie’s hand and, because Melisande wasn’t much bigger than her granddaughter, almost succeeded in dragging her from the room.

  “Gin, let me talk to Grammie for a few minutes before you drag her off, please,” Dev said, turning to shrug helplessly at Delilah. “Maybe your aunt Delilah wants to see the ants instead?”

  Dev only felt a little bad for throwing Delilah under the bus—besides, Ginny just wanted a little attention and Delilah was amazing with kids. In point of fact, without further prodding she took Ginny’s outstretched hand, tiny fingers slipping easily into Delilah’s palm, and pulled her niece in for a bear hug.

  “Show me the ants.”

  Ginny, pleased with her hug and the prospect of having her aunt’s undivided attention, grinned.

  “Okay!”

  She pulled Delilah along behind her, leaving the warmth of the kitchen and heading back upstairs. Dev watched them go, relieved that Ginny had saved her from being rude to Delilah. She wished she could just let her baby sister’s condescending tone wash over her without affecting her state of being, but it was almost impossible. Delilah was aces at making her feel like she was being judged.

  “So shall I make us some tea?” her mother asked, already starting to putter around the kitchen, which she knew as well as Dev did, if not better. “And then we can sit down and discuss what to do next?”

  It was so rare to not feel the overwhelming yoke of responsibility around her neck that Dev almost enjoyed her mother trying to take over and fix everything—it was like being ten again . . . and she knew she’d only be able to handle it for a little while before it started to bug her.

  “The tea is in the—”

  “I know,” her mother said with a smile, bustling over to the other side of the kitchen, where she opened a cabinet door to reveal a whole shelf full of tea tins. “You’ve changed less than you think.”

  Her mother winked at her.

  “Now sit, sit and tell me what’s happened.”

  Dev did as her mother asked, pulling out one of the spindle-backed chairs and taking a seat at the kitchen table.

  “Lucretia’s memento mori,” Dev began, her hands busily pulling at a loose string in the tablecloth as her mother filled the kettle. “Well, it didn’t start there, but it’s where I found the letter . . .”

  Dev pushed back her chair, careful not to scrape the wood floor as she stood up. She left her mother pulling teacups from the shelf and went into the living room. Dev retrieved a brown envelope from inside the antique armoire where she kept her good china and her grandmother’s silver service, careful with its handling. She worried that too much jostling would damage its fragile contents. She carried the envelope back into the kitchen and set it on the table.

  “It’s from Lucretia. Addressed to me and written so long ago it boggles my mind.”

  Her mother stopped what she was doing and turned to look at Dev, brow wrinkled wit
h concern.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?” she asked—not angry, exactly, but definitely unnerved. Now Dev really did feel ten again, but with the caveat that this time she was a kid who’d done something bad and was about to get punished for it.

  “I’m telling you now,” Dev said, shrugging as she retook her seat. “The letter concerns a tarot spread—”

  Her mother held up a hand for Dev to stop speaking, then crossed the kitchen and knelt down beside her carpetbag. She unzipped it, digging through a mound of clothing and toiletries before she spied what she was looking for. She lifted up a plastic Ziploc bag and held it aloft.

  “Here,” she said, handing the plastic baggie to Dev before climbing back to her feet. “Open it.”

  Dev did as she was told and pulled out a rectangular object wrapped in paper towels. As she unwrapped it, the kettle whistled and her mother turned off the eye of the stove and began to fill the teacups.

  “I found the Russian tea,” her mother said, spooning the sweet tea into the hot water. “Hope that’s okay?”

  Dev nodded, but she was hardly paying attention to her mother’s words. Inside of the nest of paper towels was a slim stack of tarot cards. She began to lay the cards out on the tabletop, her hand shaking:

  The World

  The Magician

  The Hierophant

  The Devil

  The Fool

  It was Lucretia’s spread. The one referenced in the aged and crumbling letter Dev had found hidden inside the frame of Lucretia’s memento mori.

  “Why . . . ?” Dev asked in wonderment.

  It seemed like only hours since she’d pulled these very cards for Eleanora—it was hard to remember that those “hours” were actually many days ago and that Eleanora was dead now. She didn’t want to hate the spread laid out on her table like a portent of death. She tried not to blame the cards for everything that had happened. They were only the harbinger of evil, not the evil itself.

  Her mother set one of the teacups down in front of Dev and then took the chair opposite her.

  “They’ve cropped up over and over again these last few weeks,” her mother said, frowning as she lifted the teacup to her lips and found the liquid too hot to sip. “And it’s not just me. Darrah, too.”

  Darrah was only eighteen months younger than Dev, so their parents had always called them the Irish Twins. She and Dev emailed frequently, but Darrah hadn’t said a word to her about any of this.

  “She never mentioned anything to me,” Dev heard herself say, the defensive tone of her voice making her sound childish and petty.

  “I don’t think either of us realized the significance until you called—and Daphne and Delilah don’t ply the trade, so they wouldn’t have known one way or the other.”

  Dev realized that this was probably the case—the Montrose women were notorious for focusing on the positives and ignoring the negatives. Plus her mother was right: Delilah and Daphne were completely out of the loop.

  Delilah led an itinerant lifestyle that seemed at odds with Dev’s life, but at least she still believed that magic existed and being a Montrose woman meant you came from a magical heritage. Daphne, on the other hand, was willfully ignorant of this fact.

  By far the most conventional of the sisters, Daphne had moved to Chicago and married a wealthy pediatrician. She loved playing society wife and mixing with the Windy City’s movers and shakers, but she’d really found her bliss by working with charitable organizations across the city. Not just sitting on their boards, but going out into the city and actually getting her hands dirty. Dev admired Daphne greatly, but she didn’t appreciate how her younger sister pooh-poohed their family’s facility with the cards.

  “Does the coven have any idea what it might mean?” Melisande asked, finally taking a sip of her tea. “Because I have some thoughts.”

  “Like?” Dev asked.

  “The cards are both literal and not literal in this instance,” Melisande said. “The World isn’t just the human one, but ours . . . the world of the covens.”

  Dev nodded.

  “And maybe it’s even more than that . . . once upon a time, I knew someone from another world. It was similar to ours, but with marked differences.”

  Melisande stopped speaking, her eyes far away.

  “But that was a long time ago. As for The Fool . . . this person is blinded by the sun, unable to see the truth right in front of them.”

  “A literal ‘person’?” Dev asked.

  “Yes, a real person. And they think they’re doing the right thing,” Melisande said. “But they’re being used.”

  Dev’s stomach turned, her mind trying to figure out who among them fit the bill of The Fool.

  “I wonder if Eleanora and Hessika might have some thoughts on this.”

  Her mother set her teacup down in its saucer and stared at Dev.

  “What do you mean?”

  Dev swallowed, not sure how best to broach the subject, but then she decided to just be blunt:

  “Mom, they’re both Dream Walkers . . . and they want to speak to you.”

  Dev was glad Melisande had already set her teacup down. Otherwise, she was certain her mother would’ve spilled the hot liquid all over the table.

  * * *

  The information was no sooner out of Dev’s mouth then Melisande had insisted they go upstairs and wake Marji. Now the three of them sat in a semicircle in the middle of Marji’s bedroom floor—Marji and Dev still in their nightclothes—and waited for the ghosts to make themselves known.

  “Mama?” Marji asked. “Why can I see them and you guys can’t?”

  Her elder daughter looked so tired and woebegone sitting in between them that it made Dev sad. She reached over and tucked a strand of loose hair behind Marji’s ear.

  “I don’t know, sweet pea,” she said. “But maybe it’s because you’re special. You can see things that others can’t and it’s a good thing, not bad.”

  Marji’s face puckered up like she’d eaten something tart.

  “But it’s scary sometimes,” she said, and rested her head on Dev’s shoulder. “I don’t like it.”

  Melisande reached out and patted Marji’s arm.

  “God only gives us what we can handle, Marji-May,” she said, and smiled at her granddaughter. “The scary stuff is what makes us stronger. I promise you that.”

  Marji nodded, but her big eyes were wide with uncertainty—and then a cold chill shot through the room.

  “They’re here,” Marji said, staring at something on the other side of the room. “The tall lady and Auntie E.”

  Dev caught her mother’s eye.

  “It’s been so long, Eleanora,” Melisande said. “I wish I could see you. I’m jealous of Marji’s abilities.”

  Marji grinned, then looked over at her grandmother.

  “What’s so funny?” Dev asked.

  “Auntie E said Grammie’s haircut makes her look like the Flying Nun.” She turned back to Dev. “Who’s the Flying Nun, Mama?”

  Melisande snorted.

  “Ha! I’ll take it. Just so long as she doesn’t call me Gidget . . .” She winked at Marji.

  “Auntie E says she wouldn’t wish Gidget on anybody. Even Grammie,” Marji said, but it was clear she didn’t quite understand what she was repeating.

  “C’mere,” Dev said, patting the spot in front of her. Marji didn’t need to be asked twice; she crawled into Dev’s lap and burrowed in.

  It was getting colder by the minute and Dev shivered, wrapping her arms around Marji.

  “I’m not cold, Mama,” Marji said, wiggling out of Dev’s embrace. Then: “The tall lady says that we need all the Montrose women here—and that we have to listen to Thomas. Especially you, Mama.”

  Melisande shot Dev a look.

  “Who’s Th
omas?” she asked.

  Dev opened her mouth to reply, but Marji answered for her.

  “He was good and then he was bad and then he was good again, Grammie. Mama tied him up and I think it hurt him a little.”

  “He’s the one in the Mucho Man Cave,” Dev added to clarify—which only made Melisande shake her head. “The one who broke into our house . . . ?”

  She’d told her mother about the break-in, but what had been said on the phone was now clearly forgotten.

  “No, I remember that, Devandra,” Melisande replied, her tone sharp. “There was just . . . someone . . . a long time ago.”

  Marji began nodding, her eyes narrowed as she listened intently.

  “The tall lady says that it’s your Tommy. That’s why they wanted to talk to you, Grammie. So you didn’t get your heart hurt when you see him. ’Cause he looks just the same.”

  Dev watched the color drain from her mother’s face.

  “No.”

  Marji was still listening to the Dream Walkers, so she didn’t see her grandmother’s distress, but Dev did.

  “Mom, are you okay—”

  Melisande shook her head, then raised her hand for Dev to hold on.

  “It’s . . . just give me a moment.”

  Dev gave her mother some space, returning her attention to Marji.

  “Uh-huh,” Marji murmured, concentrating on whatever Eleanora and Hessika were saying to her. “Uh-huh. Okay. I’ll tell her.”

  She turned to look at her grandmother.

  “Grammie?”

  “Yes, dear heart,” Melisande said, managing a weak smile.

  “It’s not his fault. He couldn’t tell you, but he’s not from here. Auntie E says not to be mad at him.”

  “The tarot spread?” Dev asked. “Who is The Fool? Do you know?”

  Marji shook her head.

  “They don’t know, Mama. Eleanora says she’s been worried about that one. It’s been on her mind a lot. She believes that Lyse is The Magician . . . but who The Fool is, she just doesn’t know.”

  Dev nodded.

  “Eleanora? What do you mean . . . it wasn’t his fault?” Melisande asked, but Marji bit her lip and scrunched her eyebrows together.