Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  Eight

  The first afternoon Will spent at Josh’s house, he figured the chances that he’d still be working with her a month later were around 2 percent.

  Four days later, he’d increased the chances to 25 percent.

  Josh didn’t like the emotional stuff. She didn’t want to talk about her feelings or her family or her past—definitely not her past. She didn’t want to know why Will lived with the county (Mom drank, Dad just didn’t care) or if he was single (he’d broken up with his last girlfriend because she was obsessed with cross-country) or what he was into (he lived and breathed self-help books).

  What Josh did like was dream walking and anything to do with it. When she talked about her work, she spoke easily. She explained concepts clearly. She was patient. She even gave examples from her own experience, which were as close to sharing personal stories as she ever came.

  And she was good. From the moment she began instructing him, Will didn’t doubt that she knew what she was talking about. Not just the ass-kicking stuff—although he was pretty sure she could name every bone and muscle in the body and apparently she was a black belt in three different forms of martial arts—but how to make decisions while in the Dream. She knew why she did what she did.

  “There are only three ways to deal with a nightmare,” she told him, the day after she showed him the quilt. “One: Resolve it. Two: Convince the dreamer that they’re dreaming. Three: Bail.”

  “Bail?” Will had repeated. He was sitting on a trunk in the basement where the training equipment was stored. Josh was pacing in front of a dry-erase board that he and Josh had purchased and hung on the wall right after school.

  “If the odds are stacked against you, get out of there. A certain amount of risk is inevitable, but don’t take stupid chances and don’t stick around if you can’t resolve things. Remember Burkov’s Tenet: A dream walker’s life is worth as many resolved dreams as seven to the seventh power.”

  “What does that actually mean?” Will asked.

  “It means don’t get killed.”

  She knew a seemingly inexhaustible store of sayings, all attributed to famous dream walkers of the glorious past. Will had been relieved to learn that Deloise and Winsor found this as irritating as he did.

  “We work in quantity,” Josh added.

  “Back up,” Will said. “Quantity?”

  “Right, sorry, I jumped ahead there.” She ran a hand through her hair. She had very little ego about the work she did or how she did it, which fascinated Will. “Where’s my trimidion?”

  She went to a wicker basket that held an assortment of odds and ends, and returned with a small pyramid made of bars like golden toothpicks in one hand, and a little round base with another, longer gold toothpick coming out of it in the other. After setting these on the trunk next to Will, she pulled the diagram of the three universes out of the piles of notes they were generating.

  She started to speak and then paused, and the pause turned into a stilted question. “Are you religious?”

  Since Josh didn’t like to get personal, the question surprised Will. He did his best to answer it honestly. “I was raised Catholic, but I haven’t been to church since I was like eight.”

  “But you probably believe in souls, right?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I do believe people are more than just flesh and blood.”

  “All right. So when people fall asleep in the World, some part of them travels from the World to the Dream. You can think of it as a soul or a spirit or consciousness or whatever you want, just realize that it’s people leaving the World and entering the Dream.”

  She pointed to the arrow on the diagram that showed this. Will felt himself frown without meaning to. He hadn’t realized he’d still been thinking of dreams as something that took place inside people’s heads; that was what all those psychology books he’d read told him, after all. That was what science told him.

  “So at any given time, there are about half a billion people on the planet dreaming,” Josh said. “The trimidion is basically a scale with three sides instead of two. Each corner represents one of the universes. They measure emotional turmoil, and we need to keep them roughly in balance. Now, the World is much more stable than the Dream. It destabilizes over decades, not hours like the Dream. Death always remains in perfect balance.”

  “So wouldn’t the Dream throw everything completely out of whack, since it’s full of nightmares?”

  “Absolutely. Nobody’s been able to measure how many dreams are actually nightmares, but some psychologists think it might be as many as three-quarters. Dream theorists think it’s much lower, closer to one-quarter. Regardless, that’s a lot of emotional turmoil to mess with the balance.”

  Her whole job, Will reflected, as Josh continued talking, is about keeping emotions from spilling over. That’s got to mess her up.

  It explained a lot.

  “Is that why you only try to resolve nightmares? Because they’re the only ones that mess up the balance?”

  “Um, yeah. Basically. Happy dreams can have the opposite effect and stabilize the Dream. Happy dreams do our job for us. But there’s a lot of controversy over what sorts of dreams we should interfere with, if we should just try to end out-and-out nightmares or if we should get involved in any old unhappy dream. You should talk to Winsor if you’re interested in that. She likes to resolve humiliation dreams. You know—you show up for class late, without your homework or your pants?”

  Will nodded. That told him a lot about Winsor.

  “But the long and the short of it is that we just don’t have the manpower to deal with all the nightmares in the world, let alone go after embarrassment dreams and forgotten-homework dreams and running-late dreams.”

  “Why not recruit more people?”

  “We can, but at some point we’re going to have trouble maintaining secrecy.”

  This was something Will had been curious about. “Yeah, why the secrecy? Why not just come out and tell the World what you’re doing? I mean, you’re helping people. I know it would be crazy for a while, but in the long run everybody would probably be better off.”

  Josh thought for a minute. She ran her hand through her short hair, which was something Will had noticed she did when she was thinking. “This is complicated,” she said. “We can’t come out to the World because we have to protect the Dream from people who would want to manipulate it and use it for their own ends.”

  Whoa, Will thought.

  “But that’s a different conversation,” Josh said before picking up where she’d left off. “Nightmares cause emotional turmoil in the Dream, which throws it out of balance with the World and Death. We monitor the balance between universes with this little thingy, which we call the trimidion.”

  She assembled the golden thingy. The pyramid balanced on a stand that stuck straight out of a flat base. Looking closely, Will made out tiny markings on the corners: an empty circle, a solid circle, and a spiral.

  “What are those?” he asked.

  “Labels, basically. The empty circle is the World. The solid circle is Death. The spiral is the Dream. When one of the universes is out of balance, that corner of the pyramid will hang closer to the stand.”

  The pyramid was, in fact, tilted so that the Dream’s corner hung lower than the other two. “That’s wild,” Will said. “This thing definitively doesn’t work on gravity.”

  “Um, no, it doesn’t. Each dream walker has one. It tells us how close we are to keeping the Dream in balance on a local level. If it’s hanging way too far, we all work extra shifts. If it’s about level, we can take a few nights off.”

  Will straightened up from examining the trimidion. “But why is Death always in perfect balance?”

  He realized too late that he probably shouldn’t have brought up death, that it was one of the topics Josh didn’t like to discuss, so he was surprised when she smiled enigmatically. “Nobody knows,” Josh said. “It’s a dream-theory mystery.”

  “D
o you like mysteries?” he couldn’t resist asking, suspecting she didn’t.

  “No,” she said. “But I do like solving them.”

  * * *

  After more than a week of learning dream theory and basic hand-to-hand combat techniques, Will went into his second nightmare with Josh.

  Will watched as Josh touched the looking stone in the archroom. Instantly, a vaporous image of a man with a bomb strapped to his chest appeared in the empty archway. Josh frowned at it, and another image took its place. She jumped from one dream to another as quickly as if she were changing TV stations with a remote.

  “When can I learn how to use the looking stone?” Will asked, and she glanced at him.

  “You didn’t need any lessons last week.”

  “You just put your hand on the stone? There isn’t any more to it?”

  “There is for most people. But you must have some sort of knack for it. Believe me, if I’d known, I never would have let you near it.” She frowned, then lifted her hand from the looking stone. “There is one thing we should discuss before we go in, one of those mysteries of dream theory: Chyman’s Dilemma.”

  “Chyman’s Dilemma,” Will repeated, trying to commit the name to memory. “Okay. What’s that?”

  “When we go through the archway into the Dream, the archway sort of … keeps track of us. It’s called ligamus. If we were in-Dream and Deloise walked into the archroom, she’d be able to see us in the Veil, and she’d be able to jump in and help. When we resolve a nightmare, we always come out the same archway we went into because of ligamus. But sometimes we don’t manage to resolve a nightmare, and it ends on its own because the dreamer wakes up or starts having a different dream or whatever. In that case, the Dream shifts and dumps us in some other nightmare.”

  “You can’t just open an exit before the Dream shifts?” Will asked. He didn’t like the idea of being randomly dumped into a nightmare.

  “There’s almost never enough warning. If the Dream shifts with you in it, ligamus no longer applies. The Veil vanishes and the archway can’t track you any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s another dream-theory mystery, and it happens pretty frequently. Chyman’s Dilemma is sort of the common cold of dream theory.” She put her hand back on the looking stone, and after an instant, a nightmare popped up. “If we trigger Chyman’s Dilemma, resolving a nightmare will no longer cue the Dream to release us. We have to open an exit in order to leave. That’s why you never, ever go into the Dream without your lighter and compact. Once you trigger Chyman’s Dilemma, they’re your only way out.”

  “What happens if you forget them and trigger Chyman’s Dilemma?” Will asked.

  From the guilty look on her face, Will understood that Josh had been hoping he wouldn’t ask that question. “Then the only way to get out of the Dream is to find another dream walker who can open an exit for you. But the Dream is vast. The chances of finding another dream walker are very small.”

  “So if you get lost in the Dream … you die?”

  Josh nodded and glanced away. “You die in a nightmare you’re too tired to fight.”

  That is not good news, Will thought. He decided that remembering to take keys into the Dream was now the single most important thing in his life.

  “Anyway,” Josh said, obviously eager to change the subject, “if you do trigger Chyman’s Dilemma and then open an exit, there’s a small chance that the exit will lead to an archway other than this one, because ligamus no longer applies. But that pretty much only happens in cases of multiple shifts, and there’s sort of an unspoken rule of hospitality regarding lost dream walkers who come out of the wrong archway.”

  Will could just imagine the look on the face of a Pakistani dream walker if Will and Josh suddenly walked out of his archway. But he supposed it had happened before.

  Josh was staring through the archway at a nightmare in which an old man tried to crawl from his burning home. “By the way,” she said, her voice strained, “what are you afraid of?”

  Will blinked and wondered if he’d heard her right. “What?”

  She fiddled with the pendant she wore, clearly uncomfortable discussing something so personal. “I was talking to my grandma last night, and she pointed out that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go rushing into any nightmares full of things you fear. We should stick to things that don’t freak you out too much, at least to start. So I thought I’d ask what you’re afraid of.”

  Will compiled a list in his head: Loneliness. Guilt. Being where I’m not wanted.

  Aloud, he said, “Drowning. You?”

  “Birds,” she replied immediately.

  They didn’t look at each other.

  After a long silence, Josh asked, “How do you feel about mobs?”

  “Fine. Great. I love mobs.”

  “Let’s try this one, then.”

  Through the archway, Will saw a middle-aged woman running through a house. In each room, faces were pressed up against her windows; people were beating on the glass and screaming. The woman raced from one window to the next pulling curtains and blinds, but each opened up again as soon as she left the room.

  Lots of doors, Will thought, trying to remember what Josh had taught him. Plenty of easy exits.

  “Here’s the plan,” Josh said, speaking quickly. With one hand she touched her pocket to make sure she had her lighter and compact; Will doubted she was aware that she did it. “The dreamer’s afraid of the mob getting into the house. We can’t fight a whole mob, so we have to convince her that those people aren’t a threat. I’m going to reassure her that the house is sturdy and will protect her, and if she believes me, the nightmare should resolve. Got it?”

  “Got it. What do I do?”

  “Observe. And try not to get killed.”

  Nice to feel needed, Will thought, but in truth he was relieved.

  They jumped through the archway. Josh had explained that they could step through, but they’d just end up falling. If they jumped, they were more likely to land on their feet.

  Josh pulled it off. Will landed on a coffee table, stumbled, and fell onto an overstuffed red couch. The dreamer, who was struggling with a Venetian blind, stopped muttering to herself and stared at them both.

  “We’re here to help,” Josh said.

  Will scrambled up from the couch. He looked around the living room, at all the faces pressed against the windows, and wondered how much pressure the glass could withstand before it would shatter. In his mind, he saw the glass bursting and the faces streaked with blood, and there wouldn’t even be anyone who could help him.…

  “The house is very strong,” Josh continued. “There’s no way those people can get inside. The doors have lots of locks and the windows are made of bulletproof glass. You’re safe inside the house. They can’t come in.”

  Suddenly, Will realized what was happening. He’d let the dreamer’s fear take him over, just like he had in the Meepa nightmare.

  You’re safe in your egg, he told himself, practicing what Josh had taught him. You are surrounded by the strong walls of your egg, and nothing can hurt you.

  He imagined the egg around him, not made of eggshell but of an iridescent energy force field that would incinerate anything that tried to pass through it. The fear passed.

  The dreamer listened to Josh’s reassurances, stared at her for a moment, and then gave a hopeless cry and ran into the next room.

  Josh and Will looked at each other. “Well,” she said. “That didn’t work at all.”

  “What now?”

  “Follow her. Improvise. But if that mob gets in, we need to abort immediately.”

  They found the woman in the kitchen, where the bright sunlight outside was obscured by dozens of faces pressed up against the window above the sink and the sliding-glass door. The sight of the door disturbed Will; faces were pressed against it even at floor level, as if people were lying on top of each other outside with only their heads touching th
e glass. The woman was muttering again: “Listening, like they can’t hear anything…”

  Josh quickly dragged a curtain over the door, darkening the room. “We’re here to help,” she said again.

  The dreamer gave her a look that implied Josh was being ridiculous and then ran to the next room. As they followed her, Will glanced over his shoulder and saw the kitchen growing light again as the curtain over the sliding-glass door drew itself back.

  They ran into a bedroom. “We can push this against the window,” Josh said, pointing to a wardrobe. “It will work much better than the curtains.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” the woman cried. To herself, she whispered, “Here I’m doing everything I can—they’re all walking around like it’s St. Patrick’s Day—the bloody curtains won’t stay shut—”

  She ran back into the hallway. The bedroom curtains swished open as if by magic. Faces were pressed so hard against the glass that they were flattened and misshapen.

  “This isn’t working either,” Josh said.

  “I noticed,” Will said. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think.…”

  The woman ran past the bedroom door and they followed her into a parlor full of cream-colored furniture and dried roses in porcelain vases. All the available surfaces were decorated with tiny glass animals and seashells.

  Josh sat down on the sofa and thought. Will didn’t know how she could ignore the woman, or the flattened, slobbering faces crammed against the windows—they were starting to creep him out—or how she could be so calm just knowing that she was inside a nightmare. She might have been sitting on the couch in her own living room.

  Will felt useless. If Josh didn’t know what to do, he certainly didn’t.

  “If he tells me to calm down one more time—so help me God—all I’m asking is that he listen for ten minutes—look at that curtain rod, it will never hold—”

  The woman was trying to move all the little glass unicorns and baby deer off the windowsill so she could pull the curtains without sending all her tchotchkes to the floor. Josh tried to help and the woman chucked a glass sea lion at her.