The Dreamway

by Lisa Papademetriou

  Renee plopped back into her seat. Then she reached out a crooked finger and linked it around Stella’s right pinky, as she had been doing since they were four and one of the kids in preschool—Kasey—had said that she didn’t want to play with Stella because of her “weird arm.” Stella couldn’t squeeze back very hard, but she wiggled her whole hand. For once, Renee didn’t say anything. She just held on and didn’t let go while the rest of the lunchroom carried on, eating, oblivious to the fact that Stella’s heart had been ripped from her chest and stomped on, and though he might not look it, Cole’s had too.

  The Darkness Moves

  “HOW WAS IT?” COLE ASKED as they made their way down the street. The clouds had blown through, leaving a clear sky in the fading afternoon light. The block’s mixture of old and new trees stood sentinel, and most seemed undecided as to what season they were actually in. Two were nearly in full leaf, while several were still bare, but most sported leaf buds and seemed to have an optimistic attitude despite the chill air.

  “Detention was surprisingly boring. I just sat there reading,” Stella confessed. “I had expected, like, heavy lifting or scraping the gum off the underside of the desks.”

  “It depends on who you get,” Cole explained. “Ms. Nunez makes people clean. Mr. Samuelson doesn’t make anyone do anything—he just sits and reads the paper. You can even get up and walk around. It’s practically a party when he’s in charge.”

  “I had Ms. Khan.”

  “Oh, yeah. She likes to use that time for planning, so she lets everyone do homework.”

  “It’s kind of sad that you’re such an expert,” Stella told him.

  “It’s not so terrible.” Cole shrugged. His glance darted toward the right, then flicked straight ahead. “He’s there. Don’t look.”

  She looked, of course. He was in his usual place, standing by the stoop, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not to go back inside. His steel-gray gaze followed them as they walked. Cole edged a little closer to Stella.

  “What are you starin’ at?” the man growled.

  Cole and Stella had learned from experience not to respond to this question.

  “Keep on movin’. Don’t give me that look. Everybody’s always lookin’ at me.” The man’s gaze followed them like the eyes in a haunted painting. The face never moved, but the rage flashed from beneath a tangled mass of gray hair. The hem of his olive-green pants was frayed and ragged, and his navy hooded sweatshirt was caked with filth.

  The kids at school who walked this way called him Angry Pete. Nobody knew how they knew his first name, they just did.

  Angry Pete looked at Cole. “They’ll get you,” he snarled. “Better watch out.”

  Stella walked as quickly as she could manage as the man continued to speak not to them, but at them. Cole stayed close to her side.

  Angry Pete was always there. He lived in the basement apartment, and he spent his time fussing with the flowers that grew in the little patch of garden right in front of his place. It was a potted Eden that bloomed at any time of year, but Stella and Cole feared him in spite of the flowers. He was scary—Pete and his furious eyes.

  It was why they didn’t like to go home alone.

  The entrance to the subway line was a stairway that led directly into the ground. Stella liked the way she would be walking on the sidewalk and then suddenly disappear down the stairs into the earth. But, today, Cole paused at the top step.

  “What?” Stella asked.

  “He said something—in like a whisper.”

  “What was it?”

  “They’ll get you,” he replied. There was something in Cole’s eyes, a dark movement, like a ripple or a wave. She had seen it earlier, when Connor said that thing about their dad. “Why did he say that? Why say it to me and not you?”

  “What do you think he meant?” Stella asked. She had no idea.

  “Some kind of . . . creatures from the Underworld, maybe.” Cole was eyeing the steps at the subway stop.

  “Those steps don’t lead to the Underworld,” Stella told him. “At least, they never have before.”

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “But you can kind of imagine it, can’t you?”

  “Nope,” she replied. “I’m not the one with the great imagination.” Stella moved toward the stairs, and by the time she was halfway down, Cole followed her. “I’m terrible at imagining creepy stuff.”

  “Like a skeleton with a snake coming out of the eyehole?” Cole suggested.

  “Sorry. My brain is incapable of picturing it.”

  “Really? What about a zombie rat with acid blood?” Cole took the stairs in twos: thunk, thunk, pause. Thunk, thunk, pause. Zombie-like. “Or a flesh-eating watermelon?”

  “That’s not even a thing!” Stella laughed.

  “I know. That’s the point!” With a grin, Cole paused on the steps and folded his arms across his chest. “Come on, try and think of something scary. Anything!”

  Stella shifted her backpack higher onto her shoulder. “A black cat?” she said after a moment.

  “What?” Cole burst out laughing. “Stella, we have a black cat!”

  “And she’s scary!”

  “No she isn’t.”

  “She can be. When she’s in a bad mood, and she’s all—” Stella batted the air with her left hand.

  “Lola is about as scary as a jelly doughnut,” Cole replied.

  Stella tried to keep a straight face. “Jelly can be terrifying. When you think about it.”

  Cole grinned. “Wow, you are really bad at this.”

  “I know! But I’m good at other stuff.”

  “Says who?” Cole teased.

  “Dad. You can ask him,” Stella suggested.

  “I will!” Cole crowed. “I can’t wait to tell him that you’ve developed a sudden jelly phobia.” His voice turned soft. “I hope he calls soon.”

  “He’ll call sometime tomorrow,” Stella said. “He has to.” She pulled out her card and slid it through the slot in the silver turnstile. It beeped and allowed her through. Cole did the same and they headed to the right.

  It was an odd time—4:10—and the station was nearly empty. This wasn’t uncommon; Stella and her brother didn’t live in the center of the city, where there would have been a press and crush of bodies at any time of the day or night, but on the outer edge of it. They headed toward where the front of the train would be once it arrived. Prewalking, Cole called it. Stella stared down past the end of the platform into the tunnel in the direction the train would be coming. Sometimes you could see the light from as far away as the stop before theirs. But Cole turned and faced the darkness in the other direction, the darkness that was directly in front of them and much closer.

  Stella turned toward him. “What are you looking at?”

  “Just—nothing.” He laughed a little. Then he pulled his backpack around the front of his body and unzipped it. After digging around for a moment, he pulled out his notebook.

  The problem with having a good imagination is that you could really use it to torture yourself. Cole had a brilliant imagination, and he mostly used it to write poems and create stories about Lyrrin, a fantastical country that he had made up in his head. His notebook was full of pieces of poetry, myths and maps, characters and creatures. Not all of Cole’s stories were pleasant. In fact, many were gruesome in a thrilling sort of way. Sometimes, those stories affected Cole’s mood for days. Their friends knew Cole as someone who was charming and funny, but Stella knew he was like the ocean—what you see on the surface is blue sky and sparkling water, but there were also depths, dark and vast and full of dangerous things.

  “See that?” Cole asked.

  “What?”

  “There’s something there. Can’t you kind of . . . see it?” Cole asked. “Like, if you look into the darkness enough, you can watch it . . . move.”

  Stella looked down the tunnel. She saw the usual blackness of pipes and electrical wires and filth.

  “You can imagine how it re
aches down and, maybe, there’s a river. Like the Styx. And a whole city of the dead. Or maybe a forest . . .”

  Stella looked into the darkness. Her imagination was not like Cole’s. It was good, but mostly for figuring out how to fix things or how to take them apart. Still, she could almost see what he meant. When you looked into the darkness, you saw whatever your imagination supplied. Like—

  She sucked in her breath.

  Cole looked up from the page. “What?”

  “Nothing, just—”

  But he saw it, too, and it startled him so badly that he dropped his notebook. It tumbled and fluttered, trailing pages, until it flopped onto the silver rails. Cole stared at it for a moment. Then he looked in the direction that the train would come from. It was still clear.

  “Don’t you dare—” Stella told him, but Cole had already jumped down onto the tracks. This wasn’t the first time he had done it, although he knew it was dangerous. Last year, Stella had dropped her house key from the platform, and Cole had jumped down to retrieve it. She had appreciated it but had been furious with him too. He could have been killed!

  He picked up the notebook and straightened. Then he looked back into the darkness that had moved.

  A black drop wept from the ceiling, splashing silently into an oily puddle on the filthy tracks. The silver rails stretched into darkness in either direction. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered their eerie, yellowish glow, making the few people on the subway platform look like they were just getting over a case of intestinal flu. The pungent stink of urine crawled up Stella’s nostrils and settled there as if it intended to stay. The subway oozed and dripped, thawing from the frigid winter, leaving a thin scum of filth over everything that dared to venture below the crust of the city.

  “Cole?”

  Cole looked over at her then. He had to tilt his head up to look at her, and when he did, he looked worried. “I think it’s a dog.” Then he turned back toward the dark. Even when the subway is quiet, the silence is pierced with the buzz of electricity, the clangs and creaks of movement in the depths of the shadowy tunnels. “Is it?” Cole hissed under his breath. He tucked the notebook under his arm and started toward the darkness. His eyes were like pools again, vacant, almost as if he didn’t realize he was moving.

  “Cole? What are you doing?” Stella shouted. “You’ll get run over. You’ll get electrocuted!” She followed his gaze and caught a movement. The shape was odd—it was the size of a large dog, but the head was the wrong shape and the rear legs moved with an awkward, lurching gait that didn’t seem . . . friendly.

  “Just a sec,” Cole called over his shoulder.

  “Hey! You’re not supposed to be down there!” shouted a woman in a velour tracksuit, but Cole ignored her. He trotted toward the far end of the platform and disappeared into the shadows of the tunnel.

  Nervously, Stella turned in the opposite direction. There was nothing but blackness, the void of empty space. And then, suddenly, a glimmer. The tiniest spark. It was the light of a train. It was still at least a full stop away. Ten blocks. “Cole,” Stella screeched. “Train!”

  “It’s still far away—I’ll be right back,” Cole promised, then tripped down the track shouting. “Hey! Here, boy! You’ve got to get out of there!”

  Stella looked at the businessman beside her. The man kept his eyes glued to his newspaper, pretending not to hear.

  “Don’t go near it!” Stella shouted, but Cole didn’t hesitate or turn back.

  Stella tried to quiet her fears. She told herself that Cole was helping, that the dog’s owner would be grateful, but when she imagined the shape, she shuddered.

  She turned to look at the train. She could see the white light, small as a firefly, but growing. “Hurry,” she whispered. “Hurry.” She didn’t dare go after him. How would that help? She’d never be able to get back onto the platform, not with her stiff leg and arm.

  Cole wore a navy sweater and jeans. As he loped down the tracks and into the darkness, all Stella could see clearly was the white collar of his shirt. The rest of him melted into shadow.

  She turned again. The headlight was larger now. She could hear the rumble of the metal wheels against the tracks. “Cole!” she called.

  Her brother cried out; his white collar dropped to the tracks. “Cole—no! Help!” Stella turned to look for someone—anyone—to help her, but the businessman was shouting and the woman in the tracksuit was screaming and neither of them were going to be any help at all. And now the train was at the other end, roaring into the station with a fury so large it swallowed her in sound.

  Hot air blasted Stella in the face, making her hair stream behind her. “Help!” she screamed again, then turned to the tracks. Now her hair whipped into her face and she dipped her left foot over the platform edge, about to jump. Just then, Cole appeared—his face smudged, his expression blank.

  Brakes screamed and so did Stella. “Cole! Cole!” she shrieked, and her brother was as still as a statue. “Cole!” she screamed again. “Move! MOVE!”

  He staggered toward her, and she knelt on the platform’s edge. Reaching for him with her left hand, she yanked him by the collar. Her right arm flailed stiffly but caught nothing; there was no way to brace herself. “Help me! I can’t lift you!” Her face was a fraction of an inch from his, and she looked into his eyes. They were black—the pupils huge—but she whispered his name, and something flickered in them, like a small star at the center of a black hole. His eyes snapped to the train.

  “Now!” Stella cried. She gave a final, furious haul as Cole pulled and scrambled one leg up, over the edge of the platform. He fell forward and they rolled, arms and legs linked as they had been in their mother’s belly, away from the edge as the train finally came to a stop with a hiss just two feet away.

  The train driver, fat and furious, stuck his head out of the driver’s booth, unleashing a storm of curses. But Cole and Stella clambered to their feet and melted into the stream of people that swirled and eddied from the doors of the subway cars. They did not speak as they walked through the length of the carriage and exited at the far end, crossing between cars and entering the next. They did not speak as the train started up and they walked through another door, then another. They still did not speak as they slid onto the bench, a space for each of them, beside each other.

  They did not speak for three stops. Stella felt as if her stomach had been scooped out, like the guts of a pumpkin, and set to the side. Beyond the window that faced them, the walls of the subway tunnels—dark pipes and twisting wires—slipped by. She saw Cole’s face in the shadowy reflection. He was pale. But not a normal state of pale. He was pale in a ghostly way, as if he were a reflection of a reflection. She turned to look at her brother to make sure that he was still there and solid.

  Cole must have felt her looking at him, because he said, “Don’t tell Mom,” just as the train turned, with a sudden lurch and screech of the brakes, to bury itself deeper into the tunnel.

  “I won’t,” Stella replied. She was fairly certain that she never wanted to talk or think about what had just happened ever again. “Or Dad.”

  Cole turned to her then. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Where’s your notebook?”

  “I—I left it.”

  “You left it?” Stella felt a pain in her chest, like a throbbing bruise. “Oh, Cole!”

  He shrugged, and Stella was surprised at how unconcerned he seemed. “What choice did I have?” he asked. Then he flickered.

  There was no other word for it—like a film strip or an imperfect hologram, he flickered. He disappeared for a half second, then reappeared. Stella felt the blood move in her heart slowly, thickly. She had the strangest thought that he wasn’t real. She reached for his arm and touched the edge of his sleeve before he moved his arm away.

  His sleeve, at least, was solid.

  “What happened to the dog?” Stella asked.

  Cole looked at her in the face then. “It wasn’t a dog.”


  “Then what—”

  “It was enormous. It scratched me and ran away.” He held out his arm and pulled back his sleeve, but there were no scratch marks. Cole’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. “I thought he scratched me.”

  “It’s good he didn’t or you’d have to get a rabies shot.”

  Cole flexed his arm. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  “That’s good,” Stella said.

  Cole, white faced and stony eyed, nodded. “Yes,” he agreed.

  But Stella wasn’t sure it was good. She wasn’t sure what any of it meant. And she wanted to feel sorry for the dog—or whatever it was—that had run away and disappeared onto the tracks, but mostly she just felt frightened that it was still out there. Somewhere.

  The Eyes in the Closet

  WHEN STELLA AND COLE GOT home, they were greeted by a smile in human form. “Look who’s finally here!” Aunt Gertie called, letting out a hooting laugh. “Come into the kitchen and say hello to your father!”

  “Dad’s up?” Stella asked, but Cole just blinked. When they stepped into the bright kitchen, they saw their mother leaning toward a laptop. She was sitting beside Renee, who was telling the story of Stella saving the blue jay, which was much more dramatic than the version Stella remembered.

  “Here they are!” Gertie announced. “James, I have given Stella a long lecture about the value of staying in class,” she said to the handsome man on the screen. Gertie wasn’t really their aunt; she was their mother’s oldest friend and Renee’s mom. People are often said to have a twinkle in their eye, but Aunt Gertie was more like a one big twinkle all over—she shone and giggled and swirled like a running brook and, like a brook, was a refreshing sight to behold.

  “The troublemaker’s home!” James said. He flashed a smile that reached out from the computer screen like a hug and cocked his head in a way that reminded her of Bleu.

  “Dad—I know I shouldn’t have run out of class—” Stella glanced at her mother, who frowned and shook her head.

  “Finally sent to the principal’s office!” her father went on. “I’m so proud!”