Dreamfire

by Kit Alloway

  Still, when it came time to open the window, he waited until Josh had gotten a 9mm SIG Sauer from the gun locker and loaded it before he actually opened the archway. Will had fired that gun exactly once before going back to Deloise’s .22; the 9mm kicked all the way up his shoulder.

  They dragged their doorframe and extra lanterns into the archroom, and Josh said, “All right, key check.”

  Will pulled his lighter and compact out of his pocket and watched Josh do the same. She frowned at the blue plastic lighter. “I wish I hadn’t lost my Zippo.”

  “It was nice,” Will agreed.

  She glanced at him. “It was a gift,” she said shortly, and Will knew he had bumped one of her sore spots again. But she shook it off and said, “You set?”

  “Set.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  This was the most tenuous part of the plan, and if it didn’t work, the whole endeavor was kaput: Will was supposed to direct the looking stone to show them the part of the Dream Feodor’s universe had been cut from. After a good fifteen different plans—most of them complicated and requiring much travel—they had come up with this simple idea. They were hoping that when Feodor’s universe was cut from the Dream, it had left a scar, like an amputated limb, and that if they opened an archway within the Dream right on top of the scar, it would lead to Feodor’s universe instead of the World.

  “What’s wrong?” Josh asked when Will just stood and stared at the looking stone.

  Will shrugged. “I don’t know how to begin.”

  “Just do what you’d normally do.”

  Beginning turned out to be the easy part—he pressed his palm to the looking stone and closed his eyes, and suddenly the Dream was all around him. He felt the wind whipping by him as he stood on the crest of a mountain, heard car tires peel water off the surface of a highway, smelled the sunsetlike odor of fresh-baked bread. Then, almost as soon as he identified each sense, the input narrowed to a single dream in which a young girl gathered flowers in a field.

  She had no idea what was slithering about in the high grass.

  “We have to go in,” Will said, opening his eyes as he spoke.

  Josh grabbed his shoulders. “We can’t go in, remember?”

  Through the archway, Will watched the girl whip her head around at the sound of something moving through the grass. She wanted to believe it was just the breeze.…

  “Will,” Josh said. She grabbed his chin and forced him to face her. “Find Feodor.”

  Feodor. For a moment Will rebelled, certain that nothing could be more important than saving that little girl, but as hissing began on one side of the field, then the other, he knew that even if he hadn’t had other priorities, he wouldn’t have gone through. He had no defense against a plague of flesh-eating snake-worms.

  The little girl shrieked once, then vanished beneath the high grass.

  “Feodor,” Josh said again, and Will closed his eyes.

  The Dream bombarded him again: the crackle of burning wood, moldy garbage, bank deposit slips. Will tried to sort through the dreams, to pull back from them until he reached the edges of the Dream, but there were no edges, only a gentle curve that made him think he traveled over the inner surface of a sphere. It felt as slick as ice, and he spun across it, not sure what he was doing or if he was getting anywhere, if he covered miles or inches, if hours or minutes had passed.

  Wait—what was that?

  He’d passed over something, a place where two dreams fit together incorrectly. Will struggled to slow his sliding and turn around, and then it took a while of blind searching to find that spot again, the one that felt like a record needle jumping from one track to the next. “Here, I think,” he told Josh.

  “You found it?” She sounded surprised.

  “Maybe. I found something.”

  Opening his eyes, he saw a dream parking lot located behind a strip mall, where several Dumpsters were piled high with trash. A few feet from the Dumpsters, a line ran through the scene from the sky to the ground, and on the other side of it, an angry nun in an elaborate wimple was walking up and down the aisles of a classroom, smacking her ruler against her palm and watching the children scribble on handheld blackboards. The two scenes looked like photographs cut down the middle and laid side by side.

  “That’s so weird,” Josh said.

  Will stood up, keeping his hand on the looking stone. Josh snapped her 9mm into a hip holster, then grabbed the mirror-laden armoire door and carried it through the archway into the parking lot. When the Dream allowed her easy entrance, Will followed with the extra lanterns.

  On the strip-mall side, the sun was shining. Actually, several suns were shining. The labels on the Dumpsters were in what was clearly meant to be an alien script, and Will noticed that the trash bags appeared to be breathing.

  “Ah, this nightmare might be picking up speed,” Will said. “We should do this fast.”

  Josh grew still and thoughtful the way she often did before she had an insight about a nightmare. Will was beginning to develop a theory about what she was actually doing during these moments, and it wasn’t thinking, but now wasn’t the time to bring it up.

  “Agreed,” she said after a few seconds. “Where should I put this thing?”

  They propped the armoire door against the rear wall of Bebe’s Exotic Reptiles, then scooted it to the right until one half overlapped with the nun’s classroom. By scooting it, they were also able to avoid detection from the cranky nun.

  They’d agreed that Will would perform the actual opening so that Josh could aim the gun. Not that—if their plan worked—anything would come out of the archway, but they’d agreed to err far on the side of caution, and Josh was still a much better shot than Will. So he relit the lantern affixed to the top of the doorframe and watched as the ruby light bounced between the mirrors. Using a second lantern and starting at the top of the doorway, he traced the lattice of ruby-colored beams all the way around. He hadn’t understood most of what he’d read, but what he had gotten was that the actual opening occurred because of how the lights intersected, and if the beam he directed lost contact with the network inside the doorway, even by a millimeter, the whole thing would fail.

  Will worked very, very slowly.

  By the time he reached the top of the doorway again, his arms were shaking and he had to grip the lantern with both hands. Just before he completed the pattern, Josh said, “Careful,” and he stepped to the side of the door. As soon as he retraced the beginning of the pattern, the first layer of the Veil fell out of the doorframe.

  Will only saw the first layer as a disturbance like heat in the air until it hit the blacktop, where the entire pane turned into red glass and shattered.

  “Nice work,” Josh said afterward.

  Will rested his arms for a minute, then switched the red lanterns for the orange ones and repeated the entire process. The second layer felt like a piece of cloth made of light and warmth, and it broke over Will and turned to fairy dust that coated his arms and the red glass at his feet.

  Josh walked up to the armoire door, stepping carefully through the glass shards, and reached out and tried to put her hand through the doorframe—a surface stopped her. She rapped her knuckles against it, but it made no sound.

  “It worked,” Josh said, her voice breathy. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Where’s Feodor’s universe?” Will asked. At the moment all he could see through the doorframe was a misty gray haze. “Should I do the third layer?”

  Josh frowned. They’d hoped that the second layer would look into Feodor’s universe, but unless he’d imagined himself living in a very foggy place, they’d run into something else entirely. Neither Josh nor Will had wanted to risk cutting through the third layer. “Try a piece of looking stone.”

  The chunks of looking stone scattered across the concrete were an inch and a half thick. Will lifted one a little larger than his palm, being careful of the sharp edges; someone must have shaped the looking stone in t
he archroom. The surface wasn’t as smooth as glass or as rough as stone but had a powdered texture like an unpolished gem. The deep-red color made Will think of rubies.

  He held the piece between his hands and tried to do the same thing with it that he’d done with the looking stone at home. At first he thought nothing was happening—then a small black speck appeared out of the mist and grew larger at increasing speed. Finally it seemed to fling itself at the window, and Will knew they’d made it.

  Feodor’s universe was a city, a dark, rain-filled city—or rather, what was left of a city. The remaining brick buildings sat amid piles of smoke-stained rubble that had once been their neighbors. Water splashed along the black cobblestone and formed rivers that ran down the cracked and crowded streets. There were no signs of life—no people, no animals—just row after row of debris and the wreckage of a war.

  Will laughed aloud. “It’s perfect,” he said, and he heard Josh release a long-held breath. She lowered the gun.

  But it wasn’t perfect.

  Even as they exchanged grins, astonished by themselves and each other and their Nicastro Prize–worthy creation, their view through the doorframe changed. They had been looking out over the city before, but now they seemed to zoom forward and down, into the street, across a rooftop, through a mess of shingles and wallboard, and then the image stabilized in a single room.

  Josh raised the 9mm.

  Although it had been bombed, enough of the room remained to identify it as a parlor or sitting room. Two walls and part of the ceiling were missing, but the rest of the room had escaped largely untouched. The surviving walls bore an ashes-of-roses paper print, and two upholstered chairs sat on opposite sides of a cracked marble-top coffee table.

  A man sat in one of the chairs. A sketchpad rested in his lap, and he ran a pencil over it in long, smooth strokes. Will recognized Feodor from the photo in his computer file. He had a small, focused face with crisp lips and wide gray eyes. His hair was cut close to his skull, and he wore an old-fashioned pair of black trousers, suspenders, and a gray shirt. But this man couldn’t possibly have been Feodor, because he looked no older than thirty.

  The man stopped sketching midstroke. He stared directly at the window.

  The smile he gave them was both coy and cold.

  We didn’t figure out how to close this thing, Will realized suddenly.

  That was bad. That was very bad, because the man was looking back through the doorway at them—and from the way he turned his gaze slowly from Will to Josh, Will knew he saw them.

  “Hello, children. Are you looking for someone?” He spoke with a Polish accent that softened what otherwise might have been clipped words.

  “He’s too young,” Will told Josh, turning away from the window for a moment.

  She nodded, but Feodor had heard Will speak.

  “What a kind compliment,” Feodor replied. “Admittedly, my body is not as young as I would wish. But I enjoy keeping up appearances.” He placed the sketchpad on the coffee table—Will could just make out a drawing of the city’s ruined skyline—and stood to face them. Although not a tall man, he filled the window. “You are very young yourselves, children. What is it you’ve come here for?”

  “We just wanted to check on you,” Josh said.

  Feodor tilted his head skeptically. “Check on me? That is not why people come here.”

  Will glanced behind himself at Josh. “Why do people come here?” he asked.

  “You might ask the one who sent you,” Feodor suggested.

  “No one sent us,” Josh said.

  “No?” Feodor tilted his head and a smile played across his lips. “Then perhaps you have outsmarted someone.”

  What does that mean? Will wondered, but he had no time to hold on to the thought, because Feodor lifted his hand and pressed it against the window.

  “Stay back!” Josh barked, pointing her 9mm at him. Will backed away from the doorframe, but Feodor removed his hand with a dismissive wave, as if to say, It is nothing.

  “Apologies,” he said. “Apologies. I meant no alarm. Please forgive my curiosity.”

  Will swallowed. They needed to get this interview done quickly and then figure out a way to close this window. “Are you involved with the men in trench coats?”

  “Trench coats? They sound like Nazis.”

  “They aren’t—Hitler has been dead for seventy years,” Will said, exasperated.

  “Has it been so long?” Feodor brightened again. “In that case, my appearance is most impressive. Would you like to see how I maintain it?”

  “That’s not why we—” Will began, but the image beyond the window was moving, like a movie camera that started with a slow pan, then picked up speed until it was flying down streets so quickly that all Will could see were black, gray, and white lines. When it slowed again, it framed a dim room, perhaps a basement, where Feodor stood beside a metal table with a naked corpse lying on it.

  “This is my real body,” he said. The excitement of explanation animated his face. “Do you see this sheath that covers it?”

  The “sheath” was a silver plastic shroud that had been wound around the body’s limbs and torso, even its head. It looked to Will like Feodor had mummified himself with shrink-wrap. At the ends of the individually wrapped fingers and toes, nails had ripped through the shroud and grown so long they curled, and Feodor’s face was obscured by white hair that—with no place to go—had grown down over his eyes and mouth.

  “The sheath provides for all my needs—oxygen, nutrition, elimination—while maintaining my brain in a perpetual state of hibernation, which allows my dreaming mind to project an image of me that’s much younger than I really am. But I’m not limited to my own image. I can project myself as anyone I want. Observe.”

  Instantly, Feodor was gone, and Hitler was standing in his place. Josh swore.

  Hitler lifted his arm in a Nazi salute, goose-stepped in place a few times, and then laughed wildly.

  “I can even be you,” Hitler said in a thick German accent, and turned into Will.

  To say that Will felt like he was looking in a mirror was an understatement. Rather, he was so convinced by the image before him that he felt suddenly afraid that he had left his own body and was looking at it from the outside.

  “Or I can be a machine,” the other Will said.

  Huh? Will thought, but he thought too slowly, because a great silver funnel appeared, its tip pressed against the window. The funnel began to spin with a groan of gears, and then released a dazzling burst of white light, causing the window to shudder.

  Josh fired.

  The bullet hit not the window but the doorframe itself, which broke and splintered. The instant the pattern of lights went out, the window disappeared, the image of the funnel and Feodor’s shrink-wrapped mummy vanishing as the entire doorway fell over. All the little mirrors broke and the lantern broke, and Will spun away, shielding his face with his arms as shards of glass and drops of burning kerosene flew through the air.

  Afterward, the packing area behind the pet shop seemed quiet, despite the nun who was now using her ruler to slap the hands of a little girl wearing a dunce hat. Or maybe the gunshot had temporarily deafened Will’s ears. Either way, he felt a strange calm as he looked around and saw nothing but him and Josh and a parking lot full of broken mirrors.

  A garbage truck pulled up next to the Dumpster, and tentacles began slithering out from the trash. Will carefully beat out a few drops of kerosene burning on the ground near his feet.

  Josh clicked the safety on the gun. She was breathing a little fast—they both were—but otherwise she looked as steady as Will had ever seen her.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “Yes. Nice shooting.”

  “Thanks.”

  They stood there for a minute and looked at the bits of broken mirror and red glass on the concrete, while one of the garbage collectors got dragged into the Dumpster with a scream. “We probably should have figured out how
to shut the window before we opened it,” Will said.

  “I thought I did a rather good job of shutting it,” Josh said.

  He couldn’t argue with her there.

  Twenty-two

  “I say we write it up,” Josh told Will the next day, sitting in the safe tranquility of the library again.

  “If we write it up, everybody will know we did it.”

  Josh knew she was still a little giddy from their success the night before. They’d actually managed to do something no one else had ever attempted, and they’d done it without another trip to the hospital. Granted, Josh could have waited to see if the window would have survived Feodor’s assault instead of just blowing the whole experiment to pieces, but she didn’t regret doing so. For once, she’d taken the cautious route.

  Besides, she was proud of what they’d done. Proud that they’d thought of it, figured it out, and made it work. Proud that they’d done it together. She was even proud that Will had stuck exactly to the plan. For the first time, his presence had felt like having a partner by her side instead of a student, and she’d liked having him for a partner.

  “Besides which,” Will said, “how are we going to explain how Feodor was able to see through the window? Dreamers never notice us looking through the archway.”

  This oddity had caught Josh’s attention as well.

  “I think he sensed we were there,” Will said, not waiting for her opinion. “I think he’s been in that universe for so long that he’s tied into the fabric of it.”

  “Yeah, but if he has such great control over that universe, why did it look like a war zone?”

  “Young Ben said he never got over World War II. People re-create the circumstances of their youth all the time. He might just have been more literal than most.”

  Josh made a face. She didn’t get people most of the time; no way was she going to be able to understand Feodor. “I’ve been thinking about what he said, that someone sent us.”