by Kit Alloway
An easy moment passed between them, and Josh almost reached out to hug Winsor. Suddenly there were a thousand things Josh wanted to tell her, things she’d been thinking the last month and been unable to say, little fears and complicated emotions that couldn’t be understood by one person alone.
“Do you ever…” Josh asked, “I don’t know…” She was terrified of admitting how she felt, but at the same time, she wanted desperately to reconnect with Winsor. “Do you ever … almost wish he were Ian?”
Winsor stopped smiling. “No. No, Josh. Nobody can replace Ian.”
Suddenly Josh remembered pushing a tree branch out of the way and seeing Ian and Winsor lying on a gray plaid blanket at the bottom of the valley below, their bodies clothed only by the gloaming’s deepening shadows. She remembered how she had stood there, as dumb as a deer staring patiently into the headlights of approaching death, until Haley took her hand and led her away. Now she felt a rage as fierce as her shock had been then.
Nobody can replace Ian, she heard Winsor say again.
Josh stood up from Winsor’s bed. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?” she said, and walked quickly out of the bedroom.
She ran up the stairs to her apartment, unexpected tears threatening. Too many emotions crowded her heart; she couldn’t sort them out.
She heard Will’s voice coming from Deloise’s bedroom and followed it, feeling a sense of relief. Will was a safe place. She didn’t have to think about any of this if she was with Will.
“Because your father wouldn’t even let you wear that tank top the other day,” he was saying. “There’s no way he’s going to let you go out in those bra straps.”
“Spaghetti straps, Will. They’re called spaghetti straps, and it’s a dance, not a school day.”
“What’s a dance?” Josh asked, reaching the doorway. The apartment was dark and chilly, but Deloise had two lamps and a space heater on in her room.
At Josh’s appearance, Deloise looked guilty. “Friday,” she said. “There’s a dance.”
“Oh,” Josh said. She’d forgotten all about the Valentine’s Day dance. Suddenly her hot chocolate tasted too thick and too sweet. She set it on Deloise’s dresser.
“What do you think?” Deloise asked, holding a dress up against her jeans and sweater.
“I think Will’s right—Dad will never let you wear that.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to make sure he doesn’t see it,” Deloise replied, tucking the dress into the back of her closet. “Will thinks I look hot.”
Josh shot him a glare that might have come from a manual on how to be an overprotective older sister. He lifted his hands. “I did not say that,” he swore.
“No, but your pupils dilated,” Deloise pointed out. “That’s what pupils do when they see something they like.”
“For crying out loud,” Josh said while watching Will make protesting hand gestures.
“Like yours are doing now,” Deloise told her.
Josh turned the glare on her sister. “Are you ready to go?” she asked.
Deloise shut the closet door while giving Josh a most innocent smile. “Ready.”
Winsor was already in the kitchen, wearing sunglasses and chugging down a cup of coffee at a speed that even Whim couldn’t match. Haley held out Josh’s coat and, without speaking, lifted it for her to step into. His hands fell weightily on her shoulders for a moment before she jerked away.
“Don’t push yourself too hard today,” he told her as she grabbed her book bag off the floor.
She grimaced, knowing Winsor was watching. “Whatever,” she told Haley.
“I’m going back to bed,” Whim announced. “You each have a generous slice of apple kuchen in your backpack, so my work here is done.”
“What, you just get up in the morning to hang out with us at breakfast and then go back to sleep?” Deloise asked. She fit a knit cap with the designer’s name stitched on it over her carefully blow-dried hair, and Whim reached out to tweak her nose while both her hands were occupied.
“Not all of you,” he told her, and grinned as he headed out of the kitchen.
Deloise blushed when she realized that her sister, Winsor, Will, and Haley were all watching.
“Your pupils are dilated,” Josh told her.
Deloise covered her cheeks with both hands and ducked out the back door. “Shut up!”
Through a Veil Darkly
I got a LOT of responses to my last post about the possibility of the trench-coat men being responsible for mystery disease CSAD. I got, like, an avalanche. I received e-mails calling me a nut, a lunatic, an idiot, and a dumbass, and more than a few threats. But I got ten times as many e-mails telling me to keep digging. The junta might not want to admit it, but there are a lot of dream walkers worried about the trench-coat men, and a lot of people scared of CSAD, and a lot of coincidences between the two. I get reports of new sightings of the TCM every day, and there are now twelve confirmed cases of CSAD in the Scott County area. Nine of those victims have been moved to long-term-care wards, and one is still in the ICU.
The other two victims are dead.
The junta is denying more vigorously than ever that the TCM are more than nightmares. The same with the idea that they might be related somehow to CSAD. But their denials are basically meaningless, because if they admit now that they know more than they’ve let on, and the information they held back could have saved victims, they’re going to have a lot to answer for.
I never post information that I don’t have some sort of evidence to back up, and as of an e-mail twenty minutes ago, I feel confident in reporting that several dream walkers have evidence of Feodor Kajażkołski’s involvement with the TCM. That’s right, the Madman of Maplefax is likely mixed up in all this somehow. My source for this information had already made their local government representative aware of this evidence, which had been fairly well received, and was stunned yesterday when they realized that the purpose of the meeting in Braxton was to solidify the junta’s position of denial and to attempt to quell rumors.
This just smacks of a cover-up.
What Through a Veil Darkly is demanding is that the Gendarmerie conduct their own investigation. As many of your have likely forgotten (or just never learned) the Gendarmerie was established in the 1400s under the Rousellario monarchy as a constabulary force. It was inherited by the junta and is considered by many to be the closest thing we have to a junta oversight. The Gendarmerie is our best chance for a real investigation into who the TCM are, their connection to Feodor Kajażkołski, and how to stop CSAD.
Twenty-one
That afternoon, Josh gave Will a pile of reading to do and then prowled the library like an overcaffeinated librarian. And probably one who was used to a much bigger library. Will tried to focus on the reading—something about faking abilities to reassure dreamers—but he was distracted by Josh’s grumbling and half-voiced mutterings.
She tossed a dozen volumes onto the table and sat down, flipped through the pages, stuck a marker in one volume, and then went back to the shelves. More books, more markers. Will watched her read and make comparisons and curse and then find more books. When she had pulled down half the library, he finally asked, “Josh, what are you doing?”
She gave him a guilty look over one shoulder. Then she slowly turned and sat down in the chair across from him. “I can’t sit and do nothing,” she began. “It’s…”
“Not in your nature?” Will suggested, trying not to smile.
“Right. And I got to thinking, what if we could check on Feodor? See what he’s up to in that universe of his?”
Will did not like where this was going.
“Just take a peek at him, you know? Whim said people visit him there. And then I thought, well, we use the looking stone to spy on the Dream before we enter it. What if we could look at Feodor’s universe the same way?”
“You want to build an archway to his universe?” Will burst out, clapping shut the book in his own hands.
/> “Not an archway,” Josh said. “Not exactly. It would be like a one-way mirror—we’d be able to see him, but he wouldn’t even know we were there. Only, I’m not sure if that’s possible.”
Will considered. He wanted to please Josh—he always wanted to please her, to ease that pained look on her face—and she had grown more and more restless the past several days. But an archway went both ways, and he wasn’t going to take any chance of letting Feodor into the World.
“You need … a window,” he said. “Instead of an archway.”
She nodded.
“A very strong window.” He thought some more. “How do you build an archway?”
“You have to cut through the Veil with a blade of light.”
“A what?”
“It’s just a very narrow beam of light. You can use candles inside boxes with a hole in them, so they shoot out a single beam, or a lantern with a special kind of hood. You have to reflect the lights off a lot of mirrors, and when you have this whole reflective pattern set up just right, you use another laser to trace the pattern of the reflected beams of light, and that does it.”
“So it’s scientific. Huh.” He leaned back in his chair. “I thought it was some sort of magic.”
“Grandma always says there’s more magic to it than people realize, but I couldn’t tell you for sure how it works. This is as much as I understand.”
She pushed an open book across the table. The pages showed a wildly complex arrangement of mirrors with beams of light bouncing between them. Will skimmed the surrounding text and then turned the page and continued reading. A few minutes later, just when he was starting to think the book offered no hints to their dilemma, he found something.
“Can you explain this to me?”
Josh studied the diagram he pointed to, then said, “Each layer of the Veil requires light of a different frequency to cut through it. Frequency corresponds to color.”
“What are the layers of the Veil made of?”
“I don’t know. Although one layer falls right out when you open an archway, and then you can use pieces of it as looking stones.”
Will had wondered how looking stones were created. He supposed this explanation made as much sense as any, given that they were discussing something that might or might not be magic.
“I don’t know what the other layers are made of,” Josh admitted. “They turn into fairy dust as soon as you cut through them.”
She slid the book back across the table to Will, and he sat and stared at it. He felt like some important idea hovered within his reach, and he could catch it if only he could see that it was there. He read another page, and then another, and finally the idea began to reveal itself in his mind.
“Listen to this,” he said. “‘Although candlelight has traditionally been used, automatically employing the entire spectrum of visible light, it has recently been discovered that application of specific, narrow-frequency light will fail to fully penetrate the Veil, as evidenced by looking stones, which can be cut using a light in the 432 to 458 THz range.’” He looked up at Josh. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
Her brows were drawn tight. “Do you think it means that full-spectrum light will cut through the Veil, but red light will cut through only one of the layers?”
“Yes! What if we did everything you normally do when you create an archway, but we used a light frequency that only partially penetrates the Veil? We’d pick a light color closer to the red end of the spectrum and just cut through the first few layers of the Veil, maybe up to the second or third. Wouldn’t that create an archway we could see through but not walk through?”
Will wasn’t sure if he was outlining a plan or just babbling like an idiot. His mouth had been running faster than his mind could follow, chasing that new idea even as it revealed itself.
“Did that make any sense at all?” he asked.
“I think,” Josh said slowly, “that if we pull this off, we’ll win the Nicastro Prize in Dream Theory for young dream walkers. It comes with a college scholarship.”
“We’re really doing something that groundbreaking?”
“No, we’re doing something that clever.”
She had never given him that look before, a look of admiration and excitement. The look clung between them like static electricity, and he wondered how big the spark would be if he touched her.
“But I see a major problem,” she said, bringing him down from his high. “Like Whim said, we don’t know how to find Feodor’s universe. If we just build an archway, it will automatically open to the Dream. How do we get the archway to open to Feodor’s universe instead?”
“Oh,” Will said. “It could take a while to solve that.”
It took them four days.
* * *
They waited until everyone had gone to bed. They’d taken the night shift so that they could be assured six hours alone in the archroom. First they built a second frame around the empty doorframe from the armoire they’d broken before. Then Josh and Will meticulously hot-glued the mirrors into the empty doorframes, tilting each one to the correct angle.
“Are we sure this is safe?” Will asked, squeezing hot glue onto the back of a two-by-two-inch mirror.
He was having a case of buyer’s regret. Maybe because he and Josh had been up until two that morning figuring out how to arrange the mirrors; or maybe because they’d found the information in an article originally written in Swedish and he wasn’t entirely confident of the Internet’s translation; or maybe because he had just realized that pleasing Josh might not be a good enough reason to risk opening a porthole between universes. But he suspected he would gladly do stupid things to get her to look at him again the way she had the afternoon they’d come up with this plan.
“We can’t be sure,” Josh admitted. She was using an X-Acto knife to slice wine corks into wedges the exact right angle to prop up the mirrors. “But the book said that the further you get from the violet end of the spectrum, the fewer layers you cut through. We won’t cut deeper than yellow, and that’s pretty far from violet.”
“What if other parts of the spectrum pierce other universes? What if red pierces hell?”
She stopped cutting to look up at him. “Do you even believe in hell?”
“Actually, no. But that’s not the point. What if something comes out?”
“Then we’ll shoot it.”
Hoping for some sort of reassurance, he asked, “Have you ever done anything like this before?”
He expected Josh to say no and give him another excuse. Instead, she turned as white as full-spectrum light and dropped the cork in her hand. She might as well have fainted, the change in her demeanor was so sudden.
“Am I being arrogant?” she asked, her voice dazed. “Am I doing this for the wrong reasons?”
“What?” Will said, startled. “No. Of course not.”
“You’d tell me if I were, wouldn’t you?”
He didn’t understand how questioning their process had led to Josh’s questioning her motives and judgment. “Hey, I’m the apprentice, remember? I don’t know anything. My whole job is to freak out when we do the scary stuff.”
“You were right to tell me not to go in the Dream last time,” she said in a numbed voice. “And you were right to come in after me. Sorry I shouted at you.”
“It’s okay.” Will moved a pile of mirrors to one side so he could scoot across the floor and put his arm around her. She was always in so much pain, and he was always helpless to do anything about it. “I forgave you for all that a week ago, remember?”
She sat and stared at him, lips parted, breathing shallowly, and he felt her weighing something, arguing with herself. Finally, she said, in a confessional whisper, “I was arrogant once, and someone got hurt.”
Ian. She means Ian.
He wondered what she had done. Had she knocked over a candle and started the fire that killed him? Had she asked him to run back inside the burning cabin and save something for her? Had
she twisted an ankle and needed saving?
It never crossed his mind that she was truly responsible for Ian’s death.
But looking at the tears in her pale, pale eyes, he knew that she believed she had killed Ian.
How terrible to believe such a thing, he thought, to carry that knowledge around. No wonder she always looks sad.
Will wished he knew better how to comfort her. He wanted to kiss her forehead, but her boundaries were so tall and so impassable; he was afraid the gesture would go awry. “Everybody makes mistakes, Josh.” He gave her a squeeze instead of the kiss and added, “I’m sorry I’m giving you such a hard time. I’m just nervous. I get kind of cranky when I’m nervous.”
Josh seized on the opportunity to lighten the conversation. “It’s a defense mechanism?” she asked, and then she smiled, because they both knew she’d learned the term from him.
“It’s a defense mechanism,” he agreed. “Look, forget about worst-case scenarios and maybes. Just tell me this: do you believe, deep down, that we can do this?”
She was quiet for a long time, her eyes lingering on the doorframe in front of them. Then she looked back at Will, and there was a new certainty in her face. She nodded.
“Then we’ll do it,” he said.
When they had finished with the mirrors, they propped the doorframe up against the wall. They’d purchased four miniature lanterns and fitted each with a metal hood. By punching holes in the hoods and covering the holes with gel filters, they created lanterns that put out single beams of colored light. The gel filters had been hard to come by in the exact shades necessary, and they’d had to turn to Deloise, who talked to one of her drama-geek friends, who pointed them toward a theater-supply company.
Finally, they attached one of the lanterns to the top of the exterior doorframe, lit it, and sent a beam of red light shooting between the mirrors.
By that time, Will didn’t really expect anything to happen. The mirrors, the corks, the gel filters, all that hot glue—what kind of magic was performed with hot glue? The longer they had worked and the more their creation resembled something from the set of a grade-school play, the less anxious he felt. All of this would turn out to be for nothing. He was sure of it.
