Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  One headlight grew as it came near, closing in on the house with steady speed. “What time is it?” Josh asked.

  “Twelve twenty-nine and forty-nine seconds. This has to be him.”

  “But it doesn’t look like a car.…”

  The front door opened. “He’s here,” Winsor said, and Deloise squealed with delight as she came to stand by Josh’s side.

  “I thought I’d missed it,” she whispered.

  They all waited breathlessly while the light turned, and then Winsor said, “It looks like a motorcycle.”

  But it wasn’t a motorcycle. It was a motor scooter.

  The scooter stopped in front of the porch, a padded green box strapped to the back. The person riding it put down the kickstand and turned off the engine.

  Will Kansas took off his helmet.

  Josh turned and glared at Deloise.

  “You ordered pizza?”

  Five

  “Am I at the wrong house?” Will Kansas asked, seeing the look on Josh’s face.

  She barely heard him. She was still staring at Deloise in horrified disbelief.

  “What?” Deloise asked. “You said you wanted it to be Louis. So I called Serena’s Pizzeria and arranged for him to deliver a pizza to the house at twelve thirty. Win, what time is it?”

  “Twelve thirty-one,” Winsor said. Josh heard her distantly, as if from a great height.

  “See? He’s right on time.”

  “That,” Josh said, pointing at Will and gritting her teeth to keep from shouting, “is not Louis Poston.”

  Deloise glanced toward the scooter. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Will mentioned.

  Josh finally looked at him. He was wearing jeans with the knees missing—torn so badly he was about to lose one pant leg—and had a Serena’s Pizzeria shirt, unbuttoned, thrown over his tattered white tee. His toes poked out of the ends of his shoes and his auburn hair hadn’t been combed.

  But he held her gaze with eyes as steady and perceptive as an owl’s.

  “It’s him,” Winsor said, finally getting off the swing and walking to the edge of the porch.

  “That’s not Louis,” Josh said again.

  “No,” Winsor said, lowering her voice. “I mean he’s the apprentice. He showed up at exactly twelve thirty. No one else did.”

  “But Deloise ordered a pizza for twelve thirty. Of course he showed up then.” Josh shook her head. “I can’t believe you did this, Del.”

  Deloise hovered on the verge of tears as she realized what was happening. “Oh my gosh! Josh, I didn’t mean to, they said they’d send Louis—”

  “They did,” Will interrupted, bringing everyone’s attention back to him. “Louis got sick from some bad ravioli and asked me to cover for him. Is that a problem?”

  Josh was starting to wonder if she hadn’t eaten some of that ravioli herself. Her stomach was clenched so tight it could have fit inside a chicken egg.

  “There’s been a mistake,” she said. “There’s been some kind of mistake. Louis was supposed to—”

  “Deliver the pizza, I know,” Will told her. “Like I said, he’s out sick.” He raised the boxes. “But the pizza is fine. The pizza is right here.”

  “It’s not a mistake,” Winsor said.

  “It has to be,” Josh said in a near whisper.

  “You never knew for sure that it was Louis.”

  “But…”

  Winsor finally shrugged and gestured to Will. “He’s here. Now.”

  Will watched each of them in turn, his eyes beginning to narrow. “Do you want this pizza or not?”

  Josh turned to Deloise and muttered, “Just pay him already.”

  Deloise bit her lower lip. “My purse is upstairs,” she admitted.

  After closing her eyes until the urge to shove her sister out of the way passed, Josh stepped around Deloise and walked down the porch steps. She dug thirty dollars out of her back pocket and held it out to Will.

  “Here,” he said, sliding two pizza boxes out of the warmer. He handed them to Josh and took her money. “I’ve got change somewhere,” he told her, digging through his own pockets.

  Now that she stood closer to him, he appeared less generically scruffy and more distinctly poor. The belt holding his pants on looked like a hand-me-down from better days, and his shoes were falling apart because they were too small.

  “Just keep the rest,” she said. “Sorry for the confusion.”

  Will nodded. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll tell Louis you were looking for him.”

  “No, don’t … it’s…” She sighed and would have thrown up her hands if she hadn’t been holding the pizzas. “Don’t tell Louis anything,” she said. “It’s not important.”

  From the way he looked at each of them, as if fixing the scene in his mind, she could tell that he didn’t agree.

  “Why don’t you come in?” Winsor suggested.

  Josh’s eyes flew to her. “What?” she asked.

  “It’s late, and that’s a lot of pizza,” Winsor explained calmly. “Maybe Will could give us a hand eating it? He drove all the way out here, after all.”

  Josh sent her a What the hell do you think you’re doing? look, but Winsor ignored it.

  “Yeah,” Will said, in a tone that meant, no way. He was watching them like a cop locked in a room with three suspected serial killers. “Nice offer and all, but it sounds like you guys have stuff to talk about.”

  “This is all my fault,” Deloise burst out.

  “Be quiet,” Josh said.

  “Are you trying to get with Louis?” Will asked. “’Cause you could just ask him out. He’d be cool.”

  “Oh my god, no.”

  Josh couldn’t tell him the truth. She didn’t know how the situation appeared from his perspective, but she was certain it was bizarre. And yet, he kept looking at her with his steadfast eyes and a complicated expression that—while it was suspicious—seemed to suggest he was willing to think the best of her if she’d just confide in him.

  Don’t look at me like that, she thought frantically.

  “It’s…” She stumbled over her words. If only he would look away. “We’re recruiting. We need to hire someone. My family has a business, and we were hoping to get Louis out here and talk to him about it.”

  “You couldn’t just call and ask him?”

  “No, because…” At least now he didn’t think she was trying to lure Louis into a date. She was gaining back some credibility. “It’s a hard business to explain. We have a workshop here, and we thought Louis might understand better if we showed him.”

  Winsor nodded almost imperceptibly. Josh walked back up the front steps, still carrying the pizzas. Over her shoulder, she blurted out in a rush, “But since you’re here you might as well have the job, so just come inside and I’ll show you what to do.”

  She stopped at the door. She couldn’t reach the handle and hold the bulky pizza boxes at the same time, so she stood there on the stoop, banging the boxes against the doorframe over and over as her hand lunged for the knob. She felt Will’s eyes on her back.

  “Okay,” Will said finally. His voice was guarded now, as if he’d given up hope of coaxing the truth out of them. “I don’t know what’s really going on here, but I’ll admit you’ve got my attention.” Josh heard his steps brushing the grass as he walked up to the porch. “People at the pizzeria know where I am tonight,” he added.

  “Understood,” Josh said. She finally pushed the pizza boxes into Deloise’s arms and opened the front door. “Come inside,” she said, gesturing to Will.

  His steps weren’t hesitant, but they were measured. “Nice house,” he said. He thought to wipe his filthy shoes on the mat before stepping onto the living-room carpet.

  The entire household—five people—was waiting in the living room. Even Josh’s father had gotten out of bed to meet the apprentice. Except for Dustine—who sat, a queen in a rocking-chair throne—they were all standing and facing the door like badgers
waiting outside a snake hole. Will stiffened visibly at the sight.

  “You guys having a party?” he asked.

  “The Avishes live here,” Josh told him. “The house is a triplex.”

  She made quick introductions, aware that the warmth with which everyone greeted Will confused him further. Halfway through, he tilted his head toward Josh and whispered, “What’s your name again?”

  Wonderful. “Josh Weaver. This is Winsor, the blonde is Deloise.”

  “Deloise I know,” he told her as Winsor’s father clapped a hand around his.

  “It’s good to meet you, son,” Alex said brightly. He was unstoppably sociable, which was partly where Winsor’s brother got it. Of course, Whim generally managed to be less tedious and irritating. “It’ll be nice to have some fresh blood around the place, and no one better to learn from than Josh!”

  “Yeah,” Will agreed in a voice anyone but Alex would have recognized as completely baffled. Alex began to wring Will’s hand like it was a stiff doorknob.

  Josh took a step back to whisper to Deloise, “I have no idea what to do,” while Alex started off on a speech about having a positive work ethic.

  “I guess … What would you have done with Louis?” Deloise whispered back.

  “Sat him down at the kitchen table and told him I had a surprise. It would have been melodramatic but he would have listened. Will’s likely to bolt at any time.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I say we go for the shock tactic. Once we’re in-Dream, he’ll have to listen to us.”

  “What if he panics and runs off? We’ll never find him if the Dream shifts.”

  “In which case we can recruit Louis tomorrow,” Josh finished, with much more bravado than she felt. “Look, Will seems like he can keep his head on straight. I’ll just take him downstairs and show him the archway. If we just tell him what’s going on, he’s going to think we’re crazy.”

  “I guess.…” Deloise repeated.

  “Go grab Winsor and meet us in the archroom.”

  “Okay.” Deloise headed for the kitchen, where Winsor had vanished with the pizzas. Josh stepped forward so that she, Alex, and Will formed a triangle. “And in the end, those long hours count,” Alex was saying. “Sure, we might not see it in this lifetime, but they count.”

  “I’m still not sure exactly what you do,” Will began, and Josh quickly cut in.

  “Which is why I think we should go down to the workroom,” she said. “That way I can show you.”

  “The workroom?” Will asked. He eyed Josh skeptically. She had assumed that his auburn hair was dyed, but his eyelashes were the same color. “Downstairs?”

  “Excellent idea,” Alex told them.

  Will seemed to consider that for a moment, and she wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Then he shrugged. “O-kay,” he said, breaking the syllables. “Let’s go see the workroom.”

  Josh led him down the hallway, past the little library full of family histories and the diaries of dream walkers long dead, and down the staircase that led to the basement where, twenty-four hours before, she and a hundred guests had celebrated her birthday and put this whole mess in motion.

  The archroom was built into the farthest corner of the basement. It had two entrances, one of which was the secret passage in the upstairs kitchen pantry. That one had been built when the house was designed back in the 1920s, and the bank-vault entrance had been added when the house was renovated, doubling its size, in 1953.

  Josh had to type an access code into the panel on the wall before the steel door would open. Will gave her an odd look, but he didn’t say anything as the basement filled with the sounds of internal bolts drawing back. Josh opened the door and beckoned him inside.

  He stared at the white floor and curved white walls with obvious alarm. Josh knew they looked like every secret FBI interrogation room ever shown on television, but what the FBI didn’t have in the middle of their rooms was a seven-foot-high archway made of straw mortar and chunks of stone. The two pillars grew from the foundations of the house straight up through the bleached tile floor. In front of the archway sat a metal folding chair, and beside that, a Bible-sized slab of what appeared to be red glass rested three feet aboveground atop a steel rod.

  When the door closed with a hiss of air pressure, Will stepped gingerly across the floor to look more closely at the arch. Josh didn’t want to show him any nightmares until she had Winsor and Deloise to back her up (despite the fact that they hadn’t been too much help up until now) so she waited by the door while he made his examination.

  “So this is your … workshop,” Will said.

  “Yeah.”

  He circled the archway, and the room fell silent. Josh didn’t know what to say. They’d gone to school together since … ninth grade, at least, but they’d never run in the same circles, and obviously he didn’t recognize her or else he wouldn’t have asked her name.

  “What kind of work do you do?” he asked without looking at her.

  She was trying to come up with a response when she saw his hand moving toward the flat piece of red glass that was mounted near the archway. “No!” she heard herself shout, but Will’s palm had already made full contact.

  At first Josh clung to the hope that he wasn’t in tune enough with the Dream for anything to happen. Then she saw him shut his eyes hard.

  She had been joking about hurling him into the Dream as a shock tactic. It didn’t seem funny now.

  “Will,” Josh said firmly, “don’t move.”

  His eyes opened, but he didn’t appear to register her. An image flickered across the soap-bubble Veil—a little boy in pajamas cowering in his bedroom.

  How did he do that? Two seconds and he’s already found a nightmare?

  Under other circumstances, she would have been impressed.

  Meepa the Albino Koala appeared on the Veil. Josh recognized her instantly—a number of children had endured nightmares about the internationally televised Australian puppet. In this dream, Meepa was so large that she filled an entire doorway, her rounded ears brushing the ceiling. Her eyes and nose, normally a dark pink, glowed bright red, and when she opened her mouth, her lips pulled taut over curved fangs.

  “Oh god,” Will whispered. “There’s a kid…”

  Meepa stalked the dark hallway, rays of red light pulsating from her eyes. In one hand, she carried a Louisville Slugger.

  Josh tore her eyes away from the bizarre image just in time to see Will take two steps through the archway. “No!” she shouted again, but when she tried to grab him, she felt herself pulled forward, and they both tumbled into the Dream.

  * * *

  They landed hard in the middle of a living room. Will swore and rolled to his knees, his head hanging down as if he might throw up. Josh was already on her feet. The living room was tidy, lacking details as dreams often did. No pictures on the walls, no knickknacks. A long red couch overlapped an end table. The television loomed over the room, several times larger than was practical. The ceiling was cathedral height and the corners faded into gray oblivion.

  Josh had enough experience to know that all of this—the couch and the end table occupying the same space, the disproportionate furniture, the colors that washed away as if they had never been fully thought through—indicated that they were in a child’s dream. These were often the most unstable of dreams, and the Dream was unstable to begin with.

  “Get up,” she said to Will. She offered him her hand and he took it, groaning.

  “What happened?”

  There was no time to break the news gently. “We’re in the middle of a child’s nightmare about being attacked by Meepa the Albino Koala.”

  Will turned his head quickly from side to side, looking at everything around them as if to check her theory for himself. Enough light shone for her to see him clearly, but where it came from she couldn’t have said; no lamps were on and pure blackness stretched beyond the window.

  “That’s what I saw back there?” Will asked. “So
mebody’s nightmare?”

  “That archway is an entrance to the Dream world we all share. When you touched it, you were able to see inside. When you walked through the archway, you entered the Dream.”

  “But how—” he began, and she cut him off.

  “There’s no time. We have to get rid of the koala.”

  For a split second she thought he would argue, but he said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get behind me. Stay out of the way.”

  “This doesn’t even look like a real house,” he said as she stepped past him and into the hallway.

  “It could change at any moment. Be ready for anything. Keep your eyes out for a weapon.”

  “Here,” he said, and pulled a pocketknife out of his jeans. Josh took it and opened the larger of the two blades, glad Will hadn’t tried to keep it for himself. She was betting she had more knife-fighting training than he did.

  Ten feet ahead of her Meepa stood in the doorway to a bedroom and looked inside, her red eye lasers sweeping the room. She lifted the baseball bat with one paw, and her free paw dragged three claws down the wall beside the door, shredding the wallpaper. Josh faced her, holding out the knife.

  This close, the nightmare swept over her. Physically, Josh felt cold inside and out. But worse was the bone-deep terror emanating from the child she knew was hiding in the bedroom. It wasn’t the fear she felt at a scary movie or when Deloise snuck up behind her; it was closer to dread. She knew what was going to happen if Meepa found her. She knew that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. The inevitability was terrible.

  Behind her, Will swore again as the fear hit him. His voice shook.

  Josh blinked and imagined herself surrounded by strong stone walls. Before her father had ever let her enter the Dream, he’d taught her Stellanor’s First Rule of dream walking: Never let the dreamer’s fear become your own.

  If Will had given her a chance to explain all this, she would have taught him Stellanor’s First Rule.

  As it happened, Will managed to knock Josh down while rushing to the dreamer’s rescue.