by Kit Alloway
It hit Josh in the face. “Ouch!”
Will knew he couldn’t help. He couldn’t convince the woman that she was safe.
But he could listen.
Will was a good listener. He’d been reading self-help books since he was twelve years old—they had a lot to say about listening. He knew how to be patient and quiet and mirror what someone said to him.
He listened to the dreamer.
“So help me God—I’ve told them all a hundred times—”
“You’ve told them all a hundred times,” he repeated.
The dreamer stopped moving glass animals to stare at him.
“All you’re asking is that he listen for ten minutes,” Will said. “That curtain rod is never going to hold. They’re all walking around like it’s bloody St. Patrick’s Day.”
“They keep telling me to calm down,” she said.
“You shouldn’t calm down,” he said, and he saw that this was working, that she was focused on him instead of the mob. “This is no time to be calm!”
“Exactly!” she cried. “There is good reason to be upset!”
“Plenty of reasons!”
She waved her arms around, accidentally tossing glass animals in all directions. Josh ducked. “I have every right to be hysterical!”
“Damn right you do!”
“So help me God—”
And suddenly, in a cloud of warm relief and gratitude and a sense of having been heard, Josh and Will rolled out of the Dream and back into the archroom. Josh landed sitting down, Will on all fours.
Wait a second, Will thought. I was just getting going.
Josh was grinning at him, and she looked a little amazed as well. Her smile, covered in glittering fairy dust, appeared almost magical.
“That was…” she said. “I don’t know how you did that. I don’t even know what you did.”
He tried not to be smug. “It’s called active listening.”
“Active listening,” she repeated.
He nodded. “Yeah. We thought the nightmare was that she was afraid the mob would get into the house, but what she was afraid of was that no one would acknowledge that she had a good reason to be upset.”
“That’s a weird nightmare.” Josh stood up. She was still smiling, and Will knew he’d earned a point in her mind. Maybe a couple of points. “That was good, Will.”
She offered him a hand up. He accepted.
“It would have taken me at least two more minutes to figure that out,” she added.
Nine
“So, listen, about this adoption thing…” Will said as he and Josh made their way down a poorly marked path through the woods.
Josh felt herself tense up at his words. “It’s traditional for apprentices to join dream-walker families. Lots of apprentices don’t have families, actually, so adoption is pretty common.”
The tradition of apprenticeship among dream walkers had originated in a legend about the True Dream Walker. Supposedly he had once taken in a band of orphans called the Wussuri and turned them into ultimate nightmare-fighting champs. Josh knew she should have anticipated that her father and Kerstel would formally adopt Will, but somehow it had taken her as much by surprise as it had him.
“Yeah…” Will said. “I just don’t want to be a burden.”
Josh glanced over her shoulder at him. “It’s not a burden; it’s tradition.” She felt like she should say something else, but all she could think to ask was, “Would you rather stay in the county home?”
“No, of course not. But I … If it’s cool with you, then that’s great.”
She didn’t look back this time. “It’s cool with me,” she said, which was a complete lie. It actually made her stomach knot up like a friendship bracelet. “We can increase your training schedule.”
Above, the tree branches that twisted together like anxious fingers began to thin as they approached a clearing.
“Ah, is that what I think it is?” Will asked.
Ahead of them stood a cathedral made of gingerbread, complete with stained-glass windows of intricately cut hard candies, spice-drop bricks laid with frosting mortar, and candy-cane flying buttresses.
“If you think it’s a church for the worshipers of Little Debbie, then you’re probably right,” Josh said. The graham-cracker pavement that led to the church door crunched beneath their steps.
She pushed open one of the massive licorice doors and her hand came away sticky.
Inside, she found chocolate-bar pews, a pulpit of cookies, and floral displays made from Twizzlers and Laffy Taffy. Even the air was sweet, and every step she took released another odor, because the floor was a beautiful mosaic made from jelly beans.
“I think I’m gonna throw up,” she told Will.
“Really? ’Cause it seems like you eat a lot of sugar.” She gave him an indignant look. “No offense. But you ate a king-sized Snickers right before we entered this nightmare, and you drank that giant root beer on the way home.”
Josh knew this was an argument she would lose, but the idea that Will had observed her eating habits so closely freaked her out. “This place is still too much,” she said.
She spotted the dreamer: a goth teenager kneeling on a root-beer barrel at the front of the church. As they walked toward her, Will broke a peanut-brittle armrest off a pew and started eating it. Josh glared at him and he offered her a piece.
The dreamer was mumbling prayers as they approached. Josh tried to make a lot of noise as she walked up—she smashed a lot of jelly beans—but the girl’s eyes remained fervently closed.
“Hi,” Josh said, kneeling beside her. No response. She touched the girl’s shoulder.
“Ahhh!”
The dreamer, who was wearing a black skirt and low-cut top, threw herself away from Josh while sending out a stupendous wave of fear. Josh had been so distracted by the candy that she had been forgetting to shield, and now she had to throw all her energy into protecting herself.
I’m safe behind my wall. No one can get to me here. There is no fear behind the wall.
Just as her nerves were settling, the girl screamed again, and Josh opened her eyes to see her pointing at Will. “You’ve eaten from the sacred house! Blasphemy, blasphemy! She will kill us all!”
“Oh,” Will said. He carefully put down the armrest he’d been eating. “Whoops.”
Josh gave Will a look.
“Who’s going to kill us?” Josh asked the dreamer.
“The witch!”
“Oh, right, there’s a witch in the story with the candy house. But she needs an oven to cook us in, right? So let’s go destroy her oven before she gets here.”
The girl shook her head. “She isn’t going to cook us. She’s going to turn us into candy!”
Then she pointed, and Josh noticed something she hadn’t noticed before, or perhaps saw something that hadn’t been there before. That strange sculpture at the front of the church—didn’t it look a lot like someone trying to escape being sucked into a bubblegum bog? And the huge gummy bear in the corner—wasn’t his face strangely human? And the two chocolate soldiers wrapped in tinfoil who stood guard at the door—why did they look like they were screaming in terror?
“Crap,” Josh said.
“We have to hide,” the dreamer said. She ran out a side door, flinging it open so hard that some of the SweeTARTS decorations were knocked loose, and Josh and Will followed her into a small graveyard with white chocolate headstones. Between two rows, a casket made of chocolate peppermint bark and lined with marshmallows lay open.
“Get in!” the girl cried.
Will looked at Josh. “Is this a good idea?”
I do not want to get in that coffin with Will, Josh thought. “Look, you get in the coffin,” she told the girl. “We’re going to go hide somewhere else.”
“No, you have to protect me! Please!”
Josh gritted her teeth. This was obviously the direction the nightmare wanted to go, and she knew there was no use in fighting. R
eluctantly, she said, “All right, fine.”
“You first,” the girl told Will. He climbed in, then the girl instructed Josh to squeeze in on her side next to him. The only way this worked at all comfortably was if he put his arm around her and she rested her head on his chest.
Josh thought she was going to pull a muscle she was so tense. She was starting to get used to touching Will when she needed to correct his aim or show him how to move, but she wasn’t ready to snuggle with him.
Then the girl climbed in, facedown, on top of him, and pulled the coffin shut.
Josh felt terribly self-conscious, aware of her thighs pressed against Will’s, her breasts smashed against the side of his torso, his heartbeat beneath her ear. She kept finding excuses to lift her head up from his chest, and each time she did she felt awkward setting it down again.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I thought I heard something,” she lied.
She hadn’t lain like this with anyone since Ian died, and the guilt was mixed with a confusing sense of contentment. She had to force her head down to Will’s chest. But as the minutes passed, she began to relax, at least enough to close her eyes. The marshmallows beneath her were soft, softer than her own bed, and the rise and fall of Will’s chest as he breathed created a soothing rhythm.
Will turned his face toward her, and she felt him inhale just a bit more deeply than he had before, his chest expanding a centimeter farther. Did he just smell my hair? she wondered, but before she could ponder the thought, she heard his heartbeat quicken directly beneath her ear.
This can’t happen, she thought.
“I have to get out of here,” she said, at the same time Will said, “Ah, miss?”
His tone of voice had gone from drowsy to alarmed. “I realize you’re very anxious right now, and that we’re in a very tight space, but in spite of that, I need you to observe certain personal boundaries.”
What the hell does that mean? Josh thought, forgetting her own discomfort.
“My name is Sorsha, and personal space is just so…”
“Oh god!” Will cried.
“Personal,” Sorsha said.
“She just licked my neck, Josh. She’s licking my neck, she’s got her hands inside my shirt—OW! No biting!”
Josh had heard enough. She gave the coffin lid a hard kick.
It did not open.
“Well, that’s just skippy,” she muttered. She reached into the darkness and found Sorsha’s gel-slicked ponytail. Then she jerked it, hard, until Sorsha’s head snapped back and the girl squealed.
“Let go of my hair!” Sorsha whined.
“Let go of my nipples!” Will snapped.
Josh shoved her hand between their bodies, her own palm sweeping a large swath of Will’s chest, and yanked Sorsha’s hand out. Then she took charge of the ponytail again and tugged Sorsha far enough to one side that Will could grab the other roaming hand.
Now restrained, Sorsha settled for telling Will repeatedly that he was no fun.
“You sexually assaulted me in a chocolate coffin!” Will shot back.
“She’d probably never do that sort of thing if she were awake,” Josh pointed out.
“I hope not,” Will said.
“Wait, you mean I’m asleep?” Sorsha demanded.
At which point the peppermint bark broke into pieces, the marshmallows fell away, and they plunged into space.
Since they hadn’t resolved the nightmare, Josh felt no sense of relief, no warm gratitude. All she felt was a jarring sensation, and then she was crashing to the floor of a minimart and bullets were flying and bags of potato chips were exploding and she was hissing, “Down! Stay down!”
“What happened?” Will cried, flat on the floor, hands over the back of his neck.
“Sorsha woke up.”
“So why didn’t the archway dump us out?”
“It only does that if we resolve the nightmare or—” She broke off while one of the glass doors to the freezer compartment behind them shattered, then finished. “—if we make an exit. Chyman’s Dilemma, remember? Right now, we’ve just slid into some other part of the Dream.”
Someone at the other end of the store yelled, “Twenties, idiot! The twenties!”
“What do we do?” Will asked.
Josh generally avoided nightmares involving guns. Chekhov’s Principle, One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it, had been intended for writers, but it worked just as well for dream walkers. If someone bothered to dream of a gun, they almost always bothered to dream of firing it.
Now Josh and Will were stuck in the middle of what appeared to be a very violent minimart robbery, and as the firing stopped briefly, they peeked up over the rack of snacks to survey the store. There was a front door to the shop, and that was it. Josh cursed. “We need an exit!”
“I don’t see one,” Will whispered.
“Wait a sec!” Josh hissed. “We can use the cooler doors.”
“What? But they aren’t real doors.”
“No, we can use them. Didn’t you read that article I gave you, ‘Nontraditional Dream-Exit Strategies’?”
“Yeah, but these doors don’t lead anywhere!”
“We can make them lead somewhere,” Josh said, and sprang to her feet.
She opened one of the unbroken doors to the freezer compartment and began yanking out cases of beer. By the time anyone at the front of the store realized what she was doing, she had cleared enough space to step inside.
The cold air swept past Josh, eager to enter the warm store. She stood inside the compartment long enough to open and close the door, and then jumped back out. “See? Now it leads somewhere.”
“Yeah, you’re awesome,” Will said, but he already had his lighter and compact out and was concentrating on opening the Veil. It shimmered into view, and Josh jumped through just as the gunfire started up again. Will followed.
But instead of landing in the archroom, they slammed into a pile of wooden beams on a concrete floor. Josh landed hard against Will and they both made sounds of protest.
They weren’t in the Weaver-Avish house’s basement. They were … somewhere half-burned, a sunken concrete basement surrounded by charred timber. The ceiling above them had burned away completely, and most of the walls had gone with it. Josh knew the building had burned some time ago, because the smell of smoke had departed.
“Are we still in-Dream?” Will asked.
“I don’t think so … but maybe.” Josh stood up and held out a hand to him, and he took it. “Help me up. I need to get a better view.”
She gestured to a partially destroyed staircase. It was concrete, so it hadn’t burned, but rubble covered the first four steps. Will got down on one knee, and Josh used his other knee to springboard herself onto the fifth step.
“I can see the ocean,” she said, facing in the direction away from the trees. “I—oh my god.” She looked around at the basement again and caught sight of broken mirrors beneath the wreckage. When her heart skipped a beat, it left her bloodless for a moment, and her chest filled with a feeling like suction. “We’re in the cabin in Charle,” she managed to say.
“The one that burned down last summer?” Will asked, and Josh felt another piercing, sick shock at the idea that he knew.
“Yeah,” she mumbled.
Josh hadn’t been here since Ian died. Was this Ian’s way of punishing her for what she’d felt in the coffin a few minutes ago? The pain in her chest that woke up at his name felt like a muscle clenched so tight her chest would cave in around it.
He’s dead, she reminded herself. He’s dead, and even if he weren’t, he left me before he died. He doesn’t care what I do.
No matter how many times she repeated the thoughts, she couldn’t bring herself to believe them.
Finally, she jumped down to a spot clear of rubble and explained to Will as much as she felt she had to explain.
“This was my mother’s cabin.” She kept her
voice tight, neutral, but couldn’t help rushing her words together. “Mom died here while trying to build a new archway. We assumed she died before finishing, but I guess we were wrong, because we seem to have just come out through it.”
Josh busied herself peering at the air as if she could identify where the archway might hang.
“How old were you?” Will asked.
Why does he want to know that? Josh wondered, cringing.
“Twelve. But…”
She wanted to say, It’s all right, I’m over it. Kerstel is great. Except it wasn’t all right, not really, and she’d never be over it, even if it didn’t haunt her the way Ian’s death did. Sure, Kerstel was great, but she’d never be Jona Weaver. She’d never be Josh’s mom.
“I was twelve when I went to live with the state,” Will said, bringing Josh back to the burned-out basement. “I haven’t heard from my mom since.”
Josh understood that he was trying to connect with her, but their situations looked so different to her.
“That sucks,” she said finally.
“Yeah.” Will held her gaze, and she felt him trying to hang on to that connection, trying to make it important, but she turned away again.
“If the archway works,” she said, “we can go back through it into the Dream, but we’ll have to trigger Chyman’s Dilemma again.”
“What? You lost me.”
“If we leave through this archway, ligamus will make sure we come back through this archway, so if we want to leave through a different one, we have to trigger Chyman’s Dilemma to break ligamus.”
“If we trigger Chyman’s Dilemma and aren’t connected to any archway, how can we be sure we’ll come out through the one in your basement?”
“We can’t be. But there’s a rough geographic correspondence between the Dream and the World, and the house is only a hundred miles from here. Our chances are good.”
They used a lighter and compact to open the archway, the edges of which had never been marked in stone and so hung jagged in the air. They had no looking stone, either, but they got lucky in that the first dream to appear was a teenage boy’s SAT nightmare. Josh and Will took seats in the back of the classroom and watched as the poor guy ran into every possible test-taking misfortune: His pencils snapped, his erasers tore off, his calculator melted into a smoldering mess.
