“Rope climbing is over, remember?”
“Tell her I broke my foot,” Stella insisted. “Say anything. I’ve got to go to the library.”
“I’ll tell her you might have caught what your brother has and didn’t want to do anything too strenuous—”
“Yes, fine,” Stella told her. “Whatever.” She gave her best friend, who was still formulating the perfect excuse, a quick hug and hurried down the hall.
When she arrived at the library, Alice wasn’t there.
“Hello again,” Ms. Slaughter said brightly. She was shelving books near the back of the library.
Stella waved and gave a distracted smile. She waited until Ms. Slaughter disappeared between two tall rows of books, and then turned toward the librarian’s desk. She looked at the mural, and for a moment she remembered seeing a small mouse on the day she had the seizure. But had that been real? Or had she imagined it?
Sensing someone behind her, she turned and found Alice looking up at the mural. “I knew you’d be here today,” Alice said. Her pajamas were a white T-shirt top and pink pants with doughnuts on them. They somehow managed to be both cool and funny—and pajamas.
“It’s all real, isn’t it?” Stella asked.
Alice nodded once.
“Cole has disappeared. I have to go back. Right now,” Stella said. “Can you teach me how?”
“I . . . don’t know,” Alice admitted. “But . . . I might be able to bring you along.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re both . . . different. We’ve both been in that place between the waking world and the Dreamway. The liminal space. Me, when this happened”—she glanced down at her wheelchair—“and you, I assume when . . .” Her eyes cut to Stella’s lame hand.
“Um . . .”
“The Space Between,” Alice said quickly. “We’re different. I told you before, I can stay as long as I want. And when I was holding your hand in the Dreamway, I managed to keep you there too.”
Stella nodded. “I was almost pulled out when I read my brother’s poem. You were the reason it didn’t happen. And here—that day I had the seizure—”
“I think I did the same thing, only in reverse. You were heading off into the Dreamway, but—I kept you here.”
Stella thought this over. “So maybe you could go now and bring me with you?” she asked.
Alice shrugged. “I’ve never tried it. But if there was a doorway . . .” They both looked up at the mural.
“It’s different,” Stella said. In the murky light, the mirror pieces whispered their shimmer, reflecting only the dim beams that stretched toward the glass from the faraway double doors. Usually, the scene reflected a bright, sunny day, but the light changed everything. The sky behind the bridge looked gray, and the glass made the whole thing seem slick, as if it had just rained.
“It might work,” Alice said, looking up at the scene. Her voice was darker, too, as if the light had changed it.
“Should we—should we hold hands, or something?” Stella asked.
Alice shrugged. “I guess.” She reached out.
Her palm was wide, the fingers muscular. When you didn’t know her well, Alice appeared delicate, almost frail. Her face was sharp-featured and her arms were slender. But she had a Pirate’s hands, that was sure—hands for opening closed places, for taking what was not hers. It was a solid hand, and Stella felt safe holding it.
“One . . .” Alice said. She took a deep breath. “Two . . .”
“Three!” Stella cried. Running forward, she slammed into the wall, yanking Alice half out of her chair.
Alice lifted her eyebrows at Stella. “What was that?”
With a wince, Stella rolled onto her side and pushed herself up. “Uh—that’s not what we’re doing?”
“Are you okay?” Ms. Slaughter poked her head around the wall of shelves.
“I . . . tripped,” Stella said, scrambling to her feet.
She and Alice both waved cheerfully. Ms. Slaughter shot them a suspicious glance before returning to her shelving cart.
Stella rubbed her arm. “Was—was something supposed to happen?”
“Well—I was hoping to see—” Alice stared at the mosaic. “Maybe we don’t need to hold hands. Maybe we should . . .”
Stella waited for her to finish the sentence. “What?” she asked after a moment. “What?”
Alice shushed her. She was staring intently at the edge of the painting. “Wait,” she whispered, continuing to stare.
Following her gaze, Stella noticed for the first time that the bridge in the mosaic continued, becoming a road and disappearing into the horizon. Behind her, beyond the library windows, a thick cloud passed over the sun, turning the scene a shade darker. Before, it had looked like a bridge on a cloudy day. The kind with a strong wind that would shake and rattle the leaves on the trees. Now, out of the corner of her eye, Stella could almost imagine that she saw actual rain and that the tree branches overhanging the bridge swayed.
“It’s coming,” Alice whispered, and Stella realized that there was now a car on the bridge. And the car was moving.
The silver sedan drove toward them, heading for the span. Stella was just about to ask something. She wasn’t sure what, but she never spoke the words because Alice turned her head to look in the other direction.
A white truck was also on the road, heading toward the bridge.
“Step back,” Alice said, and when Stella did, she realized that there was mud beneath her feet and all over her shoes, in fact.
“What—”
“It’s raining,” Alice said, and it was. Water streamed down Stella’s face, and when she turned to look behind her, Stella saw that they were no longer in school. The mural, too, had changed. It was no longer a bridge in the countryside, but rather on a city street. The metal bridge, painted green, squatted like a praying mantis over dark water. The vehicles were still in motion.
Alice stood beside Stella, her eyes trained on the bridge, her wheelchair nowhere in sight. “Don’t watch.” Alice’s voice was a command, but her eyes didn’t leave the bridge.
Stella had to watch.
As the vehicles neared the bridge, the truck skidded around a curve.
“He’s going too fast,” Stella said as the sedan rolled up the side of the bridge. There was a woman behind the wheel and a child in the back seat.
The truck started over the bridge, too fast—much too fast—skidding again.
“Watch out!” Stella screamed, but the truck had already swiped along the edge of the sedan. The silver car burst through the guardrails, blasting through the concrete and plunging, headfirst, into the water below. “Help!” Stella screamed, running toward the river. “Oh my god!”
The man yanked open the door of the pickup truck and raced to the edge of the bridge.
“Help them!” Stella screamed at him. “Help them!”
He didn’t seem to hear her, but he jumped.
“Let’s go,” Alice said.
“Let’s go?!”
Alice gave her a long look. “You can’t help them.”
“What?” Stella screeched. “We have to!”
Alice looked her full in the face. “You can’t help them,” she said simply. “You can’t help any of them.”
Stella stared at the churning water where the car was slowly sinking. The man’s head blasted out of the water, then disappeared again. “I have to know if they’re okay!” she shouted after Alice, who stopped in her tracks. She turned slowly. Her eyes traveled to where the man desperately dove again.
“He saves the little girl. But her legs are crushed.” Alice’s voice was low. “The woman dies.”
A chill settled over her. Rain pelted her face, and Alice’s, and Stella wasn’t sure if either of them was crying. “How do you know?” she whispered.
Alice stood still as stone. She closed her eyes.
“It’s your dream,” Stella said, and Alice’s eyes snapped back open. They locked onto Stella
’s. A million years seemed to pass between them—time and space opened up, and then closed again, leaving a tight seam, like a scar, knitting them together.
“We made it,” Alice said simply. “We’re back on the Memory Line.”
The Path
THE RAIN FELL STEADILY AS they tramped through the scrubby grasses of the open field. The scene did not look real to Stella. It looked, rather, like a charcoal drawing, softly smudged. She wondered if this was because it was built from Alice’s memory. But it sounded real, and it felt real. Behind them, blue police lights flashed.
“Where are we going?” Stella asked after a while.
“We’re out of that dream now,” Alice replied. “We’ll be at the tracks soon.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Yes.”
“Have you . . .” Stella hesitated, “. . . have you been here before?”
“This is how I always get in.”
The cold wetness on Stella’s skin traveled down to her bones. “This dream?”
Alice did not stop walking; she didn’t even slow her pace. “I’m sorry I had to bring you this way—”
“But you’ve never gone through the mosaic before—”
“Every door leads to the same place for me.”
Nausea traveled up Stella’s throat. Alice could come and go from the Dreamway whenever she wanted—but only by reliving the accident that had put her in a wheelchair. It rattled her very bones.
“Who was the woman?” Stella asked. “The one driving the car?”
This was the question that finally made Alice stop. She paused, just for a moment, although she didn’t look at Stella. “My mother,” she whispered. And then she moved on, forward through the darkness and rain, while Stella felt as if her heart had been ground to fine powder.
Stella and Alice had shared space in a school for almost a year. Stella had heard so many rumors about Alice, and she had never known which—if any—to believe. And now, here she was, seeing into Alice’s secret dreams. Stella sank down onto the ground. Alice sat beside her, staring straight ahead. “Why do you come here?” Stella asked.
Alice was silent.
“You’re the Pirate,” Stella said slowly. “You search through discarded dreams, through Dross that should be recycled. You’re . . . looking for something.”
Alice’s hands shifted so that her fingers were over her eyes.
“You don’t have to tell me—”
“It’s a necklace,” Alice whispered. “The last time I saw it was during the accident. My mother gave it to me for my tenth birthday—it had been hers. I heard they removed it when I was in the hospital, and I never saw it again.” She wiped her hands across her face and looked at Stella with weary eyes. “But it always showed up in my dream. Always. Until the first day I crossed paths with the Nightmare Line. That’s when I lost it. But I thought that maybe it had been recycled, or maybe someone else had picked it up, or maybe it had been put in the Lost and Found. . . .”
Stella touched the silver necklace that hung around her neck. She wrapped her finger around the chain and pulled, so that it hung in front of her shirt.
Alice stared at the necklace. She reached out with tentative fingers as Stella unhooked it. “I thought I recognized the symbol on the pendant,” Stella explained.
“Where—”
“We found it with the things marked Undisclosed.” Stella helped Alice fasten it around her neck. Alice placed her hand over the pendant and closed her eyes.
“You made it out,” Stella said at last. “Out of the Nightmare Line even though you came in as a non-sleeper.”
“Yes.”
“So—it can happen. It really can happen.”
Neither girl spoke for a few moments. The only sound was of the steady rain. And then: a metal clank.
“They’ve found us!” Alice stood and began to run. Stella ran, too, and a moment later, they saw a flashing golden gleam. A terrified-looking mouse clung to the back of a clacking dragonfly as he fluttered drunkenly under the mouse’s weight. Stella thought that she had never been happier to see anyone in her life.
“We’re right by the tracks!” Anyway cried. “They’re close!”
Alice nodded. She squinted, looking toward the woods that lurked just ahead of them. There was a clearing in the trees, and Stella could see that two silver rails traveled through the space between. For some reason, knowing that the line led across the dark woods filled Stella with a sense of dread.
Alice looked grim. “I guess we’re here.”
The Nightmare Line
IN THE BEGINNING, BEFORE THE birth of the world, there was Darkness. Every darkness that exists today contains a tiny fleck of this ancient Darkness, the kind that exists beyond time. This Darkness is its own wisdom, and it has no thoughts or cares for humans. It is ruthless, this Nothing. It does not destroy. It simply negates. It denies. It existed before the beginning, and there will be Darkness after the ending, beyond the last world.
This is the Darkness that lies at the root of the Nightmare Line.
The moment Stella stepped into the woods, the air changed. It felt heavier, colder. It practically slithered across Stella’s scalp with moist, frigid fingers. The trees reached overhead like giants with long, ropy arms. But the worst thing was the mist.
It was thin and seemed to gather at the base of the trees or the crooks of the branches. But it also seemed to creep inside Stella’s body, slinking into her nose and filling her chest with a heavy darkness. It seeped into her arms and down her legs. It seeped into her mind, making her thoughts thick and stumbling. She was glad that Spuddle flew ahead, bright and spry, now that Anyway was back in her pocket. The nervous dragonfly was a cheerful spot of color in the gloom.
Something moved in a nearby tree, and Stella’s eyes darted toward the movement. She caught the barest glimpse of a black, prickly spider as it slipped into a hole in the tree’s trunk. Stella let out a breath, and it appeared as a puff of gray air.
They walked along the silver rails, which were everywhere overhung with branches and vines. Rotted leaves were soft underfoot, and Stella’s nose was filled with a putrid odor.
“I’ve always hated this line,” Anyway whispered.
“Well, then I guess it’s lucky that they’re building a new one,” Alice snapped.
Anyway scoffed, “I’m not counting on it to be an improvement. Quite the opposite, in fact!”
Overhead, the trees murmured and rustled.
“Do they talk to each other?” Stella asked. The branches seemed to pull together, like interlaced fingers tightening. But perhaps it was just a breeze or her imagination.
“Maybe,” Alice replied.
Stella tried to stay close to Alice as she moved deeper into the shadows. At every step, the light grew dimmer, the mist colder. The rails went from silver to gray, from gray to black, twisting like scars across the forest floor.
It was a hopeless place.
But her brother was in here. He was here, somewhere. She had to find him. She scanned the ground, hoping to find another poem, perhaps another one of the missing pages from Cole’s notebook.
Stella eyed the rails. She could almost feel the cold, dark energy coming from them. In other parts of the Dreamway, the rails had seemed like proper steel—solid and stationary. These rails were silver, true, but had the sinewy glint of a sea creature that lived in a dark crevasse at the bottom of the ocean. She had the idea that they might just ooze in a whole different direction, if they felt like it. A third rail lay alongside them, looking cold and dead. “And—what will we do if a train comes along?” Stella asked. “We’re not getting on it, are we?”
“No,” Alice replied, moving ahead with the confidence of someone who had been here before and did not intend to stay long. “Riders on this line have nasty Dross. I was bitten by a wristwatch once.” Scowling, she held a finger with a small, jagged white scar under Stella’s nose. “Never. Again,” she said emphatically, kicking a stone
. Something small slithered away, showing only a glimpse of a black back with a red stripe before disappearing into the leaves. A moment later, the third rail sent up a shower of white-blue sparks that turned a worrying shade of venomous purple before dying away. The leaves did not rustle; the slithering thing was still. I guess the third rail wasn’t dead, after all, Stella thought.
“We still don’t know which stop we’re headed for,” Stella pointed out.
“Undisclosed,” Alice said.
“What?”
“You saw the map—we have to find the new line. Which means we’ve got to get to the end of this line and cross over to the extension. Undisclosed. That’s the stop where it happens.”
“I just hope it isn’t o-o-operational,” Spuddle stutter-hiccupped.
“What difference does it make?” Alice asked.
“None,” Anyway snapped.
“Of course it does,” Stella shot back. “It makes a difference to Cole. He’s disappeared from the Penumbra.” Spuddle gasped, and suddenly Stella realized something horrible. “Are we . . . too late?” she whispered.
“No,” Alice said.
“Maybe,” Anyway admitted.
Spuddle hiccupped.
Stella turned to Anyway. “Is my brother gone forever? Am I going to forget him?”
Anyway shook his head.
“Am I?” Stella was nearly screaming.
“I don’t know,” Anyway admitted. “I just don’t know.”
Very, very deliberately, Stella placed Anyway on the ground. Then she started to walk away.
“Stella!” Alice called. “Stella—you can’t just stalk off—it’s the Nightmare Line!”
Stella wheeled on her. “I’m going to get my brother! I’m getting him right n—”
A faint clang, clang, clank rattled through the forest. Then a small toot in an unsettling minor key.
“Excuse me,” Spuddle said as Anyway and Alice craned their heads to look along the tracks.
“It wasn’t you,” Anyway told him as the rhythmic hiss drew nearer.
It was a train car, covered in dead, black vines and leaves that rattled like a witch’s jewelry. The windows were dark, but one was open. It appeared to glower with a dangerous gleam, as if dreaming of gobbling them up. As it neared, Stella reached for Anyway and put him back into her pocket. The train car rolled up next to them and came to a stop that seemed utterly final.
The Dreamway Page 13
