by Kit Alloway
“Don’t!” she shouted as she hit the floor on her knees, then her stomach. She had to let go of the knife in order to keep from stabbing herself.
Will took a few fast steps before launching himself into the air with a hysterical war cry. He landed on Meepa’s back with his arms around the koala’s neck.
Meepa growled deep in her round belly. She spun, trying to throw Will off, and instead saw Josh on the floor. Josh rolled onto her back just before the Slugger hit the spot where she had been lying. The hallway carpet vanished so quickly Josh couldn’t even fully register the change before the baseball bat was breaking the wood beneath. The floor wasn’t made up of unfinished floorboards like one would normally find beneath a carpet, but mahogany, like a polished tabletop. It shone in the sourceless light.
A child’s dream. Full of misinformation.
Meepa thrashed from side to side again, and this time she succeeded in flinging Will off. Although his momentum wasn’t so very great, it threw him not just against the wall but all the way through it, creating a large hole.
Oh shit, Josh thought, but then she saw Will’s hand appear out of the hole, so she scrambled to her feet to create a distraction.
“Hey!” she called. “Eucalyptus breath!” The taunt was dreadfully weak, but it was enough to bring Meepa thundering toward her. Josh dug in her pocket for her lighter. Between Meepa’s thick, fuzzy legs, she saw a little boy in pajamas cowering just inside the bedroom doorway.
“Stay there!” Josh called to him, and when Will climbed back into the hallway through the hole in the wall, he stumbled over to stand in front of the dreamer.
That won him a lot of points with Josh.
Meepa’s growl grew louder, like a scream trapped behind her teeth. She’s not nearly as articulate in person, Josh thought as the puppet swung at her.
Crouching to duck the bat, Josh said calmly, “Will, your knife is on the floor.” As she straightened up, she flipped open the lighter and extended a flame between herself and Meepa. Polyester burned, didn’t it?
Meepa halted and, without warning, the dream changed. Josh, Will, Meepa, and the child all kept their relative positions, but now they stood on a football field at the fifty-yard line. The grass was too green, like in Easter candy commercials. Stands surrounded the field, but beyond that the world faded into nothingness. The little boy was wearing a helmet and full football gear in the Packers’ colors.
The kid rushed Meepa from behind. He only came to Meepa’s knees, but when his bare hands made contact with the massive koala, she fell flat on her face as if punched in the back. The baseball bat vanished from her hands. Handcuffs in one chubby fist, the kid climbed on top of Meepa and started cuffing her.
“You have to remain silent and right,” the boy announced.
The air warmed suddenly. Josh let her lighter go out. Will lowered the knife in his hand.
The terror was gone. The nightmare was over. Relief and peace and gratefulness cradled them with hands like clouds.
Josh and Will stared at each other, both breathing hard, as the light above them grew brighter. Will grinned like they’d done something amazing together, and Josh wanted to grin back, but they fell out of the Dream before she had a chance.
* * *
The landing wasn’t so hard this time. Josh felt the cool tile through the seat of her jeans and against the fist she had made around her lighter. She’d banged her right elbow when Will knocked her down, the same elbow she’d hit in-Dream the night before, and it hurt anew.
“Are you okay?” Deloise was asking. Her voice was high-pitched, scared. “Josh, talk to me. Open your eyes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Josh said. The bright track lighting coming from the ceiling was creating an angelic halo of blond hair around Deloise’s face and made Josh realize she was lying on her back on the archroom floor. “I’m all right.”
Deloise helped her sit up. Will was sitting on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall. Winsor was righting a chair that had somehow been knocked over.
“Are you all right?” Josh asked him.
He nodded. Then he shook his head, and then he laughed, and then he said, “I might have a concussion—you look like you’re glowing.”
“It’s not your head; it’s called fairy dust. Del, hand him a towel.”
From a small table against one wall, Deloise retrieved two white hand towels and handed them to Josh and Will. Josh wiped the fairy dust from around her nose and mouth, and watched to make sure Will followed suit. She didn’t think that now was the time to bring it up, but breathing too much Veil dust could actually drive a person insane.
Afterward, she rolled her neck and felt it pop. “What happened?” Winsor asked her.
Deloise gave Josh a hand getting to her feet. “I was trying to think of what to say when he touched the looking stone. A nightmare popped up there instantly, and before I could even figure out how he’d done it, he was already walking into the Dream.”
Deloise and Winsor exchanged impressed glances, which frustrated Josh. They were missing the point. She said to Will, “You nearly got us killed.”
Just like that, she destroyed the camaraderie they’d begun to develop in the Dream. Will bristled at her. “What I did was see a little kid getting attacked by a seven-foot-tall puppet and try to help.” He stood up as if readying himself for a fight.
“What matters is that you got out okay,” Winsor said.
“Out of the dream,” Will told her. “Just so that I’m clear on what’s going on here, we got out of the dream okay.”
Winsor merely nodded. Josh could tell that the blasé fashion with which everyone was handling this frustrated him, and suddenly she was aware that this would be the first of many encounters with him. If she was going to train him, they would be seeing a lot of each other. It might not be a bad idea to extend an olive branch.
“Win’s right,” she said. “All that matters is that we got out in one piece. Two pieces, I mean. I realize you were trying to help the kid, I just wasn’t expecting you to jump in like that or I would have warned you not to touch the looking stone.”
“You mean that piece of glass on the stick?” he asked.
“Yeah. It allowed you to see into the Dream.”
“How did we get out?”
“We ended the nightmare. It dissolved and dumped us back here.”
“You do this frequently?”
“A dozen times a night, sometimes more.”
Will ran a hand over his head, sending shaggy auburn hair rustling around his face. “And you randomly recruit high school pizza-delivery guys to help you out?”
The comparative histories of the dream walkers and the rest of the world stretched out between them, eight miles long. There was so much to tell Will before Josh even got to the scrolls; how much of it would he believe?
“This is going to take a while to explain,” she warned.
“Maybe we should go upstairs,” Deloise suggested. “We still have all that pizza in the kitchen.”
“What time is it?” Will asked, and Winsor held out her watch for him to read. “I have to go,” he said. “I’m already going to be late.”
“You can call your parents,” Deloise offered.
Will’s expression didn’t have the malice that Josh—knowing his situation—expected. “Not really—I live at the county home. They’re kind of strict about curfew.”
“Oh.” Deloise gave him a light smile, apologizing for herself without making a big deal, and Will returned it.
“I’ll walk you out,” Josh told him.
They walked in silence up to the living room, where the initial spectators had been joined by at least ten local dream walkers. Josh gave Alex a slight shake of the head when he started to stand up, and opened the front door.
Despite being on the front lawn, Josh felt like they finally had a little bit of privacy. Will seemed to feel the same way. As soon as he was standing on the grass outside the circles of illumination f
rom the porch lights, he turned to Josh and laughed.
“I don’t know what I saw in there,” he told her, lifting his upturned hand toward the house. “I don’t know what happened. I mean … I felt that kid’s fear. He was terrified, and I felt it.”
It’s the worst feeling in the world, Josh agreed silently, but she only nodded.
“You do that a dozen times a night?” he asked.
“Sometimes more. It isn’t always fighting big monsters. Sometimes it’s talking to somebody, or just disrupting a situation enough that the fear goes away.”
“But you get to feel what I felt just before we … came back to this world. You get to feel that relief a dozen times a night?”
She walked down the porch steps until she was standing with him on the lawn. They were on an even level now, and their shadows stretched across the grass like sunbathers. She uncrossed her arms and stuck her hands in her pockets. “Not always,” she admitted. “Sometimes the best you can do is wake a person up or help them escape, and then you don’t feel it. But when you resolve a nightmare—that’s what we call it—that’s the feeling it gives you.”
Will was looking at her again, focusing on her entirely. “Who is ‘we’?” he asked.
Saying the name was like giving him her heart in three syllables. “Dream walkers.”
He repeated it with respect. “Dream walkers. And you’re offering me a job? As a dream walker?”
“Yeah.”
He pointed out the obvious while climbing onto his scooter. “Josh, you don’t even know me.”
She shrugged. “It’s another thing I don’t have time to explain.” Seeing that he was about to drive off, she added, “You know you can’t tell anyone about this, right? Not even Louis.”
Will grinned like the street kid she thought he had once been. “I had a feeling there would be a confidentiality clause somewhere along the way. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it to myself.”
“Thanks.”
He started the scooter’s engine.
“Wait a sec,” Josh said. “We should set up a time to meet.”
“I’ve got to go,” Will said, already knocking his kickstand into place. “Don’t worry! I’ll find you!”
Josh watched helplessly as he sped off into the night.
“I’ll find you,” she thought. He probably doesn’t even remember my name.
She walked back onto the porch and watched his taillight fade. Her journal, she realized, was still sitting on the flagstones where she’d left it earlier. She picked it up and ran her thumbs over the binding as she walked back into the house. She suddenly had a lot to write about.
The crowd of locals was all waiting for her in the living room. Deloise and Winsor hovered in the kitchen doorway. Kerstel, who had been serving coffee, muted the television.
“Well?” Dustine asked as Josh shut the front door.
Josh thought of how Will had instinctively operated the looking stone, how he’d jumped through the archway without a second thought, how he had responded to the child’s terror with protective compassion.
“The Force is strong with him,” she said, and the room broke into cheers.
Six
Will stood at the end of the hallway. Cheap flooring glared in the light of bare bulbs, but shadows grew in every corner. Doors with small windows and narrow slots lined both walls. Above the heavy deadbolt locks were numbers written on duct tape with thick-tipped Sharpies.
Will knew where he was. He’d come here once to see his mother, when he was seven or eight. The doctor kept saying that it wasn’t a good idea, but his mother’s boyfriend didn’t listen. They came anyway, and part of Will never left.
This was Detox.
He tried the first door on his left. It was locked tight, so tight it didn’t even rattle in the doorframe. He peered through the window, through two panes of glass and a layer of crisscrossing wires in between. A hysterical blond girl thrashed inside. She tore at her paper gown, at the mattress already in shreds, at her own skin. Her mouth opened and closed and muscles in her throat clenched, but the soundproof room contained her screams. Will looked away.
His mother was in one of these rooms. She was running out of water. He knew this because she had explained it once. “They take the bad people,” she’d said, “and put them in little rooms, and they don’t give them anything to drink. So the people die of thirst.” Then she had given Will a bottle of vodka to keep under his pillow, just in case. There was always plenty to drink around the house.
He couldn’t see into the second room. Something covered the window, blood or puke. He called for his mother and beat his fists on the door but got no response.
“Your tongue swells up,” his mother had told him, and then stuck out her tongue. It had turned green from all the sweet minty stuff she was drinking, which made Will laugh. His mother shook him. “Are you listening to me? They don’t give you anything to drink in Detox and your tongue swells up until it fills your mouth and you can’t breathe!”
The third room contained a motionless old man. He sat on the edge of his bed wearing striped boxer shorts and stared at the wall. His beard had grown until it touched the floor.
Will thought the fourth room was empty and was about to walk away when he saw a foot sticking out from under the bed. “Mom!” he shouted. He slammed his palm against the metal door, then kicked it. “Mom!”
She was probably lying beneath the bed, staring at the underside of the mattress, listening to her own breathing as it grew slower … slower … until it dissipated like an ice cube dissolving.
“Will,” said a voice behind him.
He shouted and spun so quickly that he lost his balance and fell against the wall. Because he expected to see his mother, it took him a long time to recognize the girl standing at arm’s length, but she waited patiently until he said, “Josh?”
“Hi,” she said.
Will straightened up slowly, glancing around. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re having a nightmare.” She was wearing a wrinkled green sweatshirt that clung to her body as if she had been sleeping in it, a theory supported by the sleep in her eyes, the crumpled jeans, and the flip-flops. “My stepmom woke me when she recognized you.”
Josh Weaver was an odd-looking girl. She was very small, and her light-brown hair had been cut short but was beginning to grow down over her ears, giving her an elfin appearance at odds with her well-muscled limbs. Her expressions were both self-conscious and responsive, as if she thought she was hiding her emotions and didn’t realize how clearly they showed. And Will knew what his mother would have said about her overly pale green eyes—“They ruin her entire face”—but he rather liked them.
He shook himself and said, “I’m dreaming?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real.” She pointed to door number five. “That room is full of cobras, and the door’s unlocked.”
Will approached the door slowly. Through the window, he saw what must have been a dozen cobras, all longer than he was tall, their hoods flared out, their fangs dripping an acid that burned small holes in the floor where it landed.
“Whoa!” Will shouted, and jumped back. He didn’t like snakes. “Where did those come from? There are never snakes in this dream!”
Josh shrugged apologetically. “If your nightmare resolves completely, the Dream will kick me out into the archroom. So I planted the idea of the cobras, and your subconscious made it real.”
Will calmed a little, but not much. “That seems kind of mean,” he said, half joking.
Josh smiled. “Maybe a little. But I thought you might want to talk for a minute, since we didn’t have much time earlier.”
“Do we have a minute now?” He glanced at Room Five again.
“Oh, at least three or four.” She gazed around the hallway. “What is this place?”
“Detox. I was looking for … someone.”
“Did you find them?”
“No.”
I never do.
He didn’t elaborate, even though he wanted to connect with her and earn her trust. If he did, there were things she could tell him. She could show him another world hidden inside the one where he lived.
But she probably didn’t want to hear about his alcoholic mother anyway.
She hesitated before asking, “Can we sit down?” He could tell she was nervous by the way she didn’t wait for an answer before sliding down to the floor and drawing her legs up to her chest, and he couldn’t help thinking it strange that she seemed so self-conscious and uncertain suddenly. The night before, when she’d been fighting that giant koala, she’d seemed as swift and sure as an action hero.
He sat beside her. “So tell me about dream walking.”
“Dream walking.” Suddenly she smiled. Not a practiced smile—it was a little lopsided—but sweet, and truly happy. Only when he saw her smile did he realize how sad she had looked before, how deeply sadness was etched into the set of her eyes and mouth. But for a brief instant, she looked happy.
Dream walking makes her happy. I’ll have to remember that.
“All right,” she began, “stop me when you get bored, or before the snakes get loose. My family has been dream walking for hundreds of generations. I know because they kept diaries, family histories. Supposedly my great-whatever grandmother, Ha’azelle, helped build the first gateway into the Dream, but who knows if it’s true. There are a few other families that go back as far as mine, but not many. Everybody born to a dream-walker family learns to walk as a kid, but some people leave to go to college and get jobs and do whatever. My father doesn’t walk much because he’s always working.”
“So you’re a sort of … culture? Like the Amish?”
“We’re a community,” she said. “We share a secret, and a responsibility.”
“To end nightmares? Why?”
“The Dream is made up of subconscious emotion the same way our universe is made up of energy. Not only that, but the Dream is a fundamentally unstable universe struggling to stay in balance. It’s continuously spilling into our world in small ways—mostly through people dreaming, but also through hallucinations, drug trips, even daydreams. If enough emotional turmoil were to build up in it, the Veil that separates the Dream from our world could tear.” Will squinted to let her know he didn’t understand, and she added, “Imagine nightmares walking into the World, all the rules of physics breaking down, and clouds of Veil dust causing rampant insanity.”
