The Dreamway

by Lisa Papademetriou

  “We’re not getting on,” Anyway announced. “Just in case anyone was wondering.”

  “It looks like it’s been here a hundred years,” Stella pointed out.

  “I don’t see a driver.” Spuddle pulled out a small notebook and scribbled. “Another thing to report.”

  “I’m going in,” Alice announced, striding toward the open window.

  “What?” Stella cried.

  “Do not mention that name,” Anyway snarled. “Never speak of that frog again!”

  “Stop!” Stella shouted, but it was too late—Alice had hauled herself up, and now she was nothing but a pair of legs disappearing inside the car. A moment later, her head appeared. “I’m just having a look,” she said. “Back in a second.”

  Rushing over, Stella called, “Alice, this is not a good idea!”

  “Would you please relax? This will only take a minute!” And her face disappeared from the open space.

  Stella stood beside the train car, biting her thumbnail and frowning.

  Here is the thing about people: just because you are saying something sensible does not mean that they will listen to you. Now, it seemed fairly obvious to Stella that any train car on the Nightmare Line should be left as alone as possible, if not more so. And perhaps this was obvious to Alice too. Nevertheless, that’s not what she did, and this made so little sense to Stella that she found it infuriating. This reminded her of Cole and of how she had told him not to go down onto the tracks, and then she had told him not to go after that dog, which—it turned out—was not a dog at all but a Chimerath, and if he had only listened to her, he wouldn’t have been kidnapped, and she wouldn’t be here in this situation, standing by an evil witch’s idea of a subway car in a Nightmare Forest.

  Just as she was getting really worked up about it, the window slammed shut and the subway car began to move.

  Falling Up

  ALICE’S SMALL FIST POUNDED AGAINST the scratched-up window from inside, but Stella didn’t have time to think—just react. Racing after the car, she managed to catch the handle of the rear door. She hauled herself up to hook the edge of the doorway with her feet and clung there, spiderlike, as the train picked up speed.

  “This is going well,” said a voice from her pocket.

  “Shut up,” Stella growled at Anyway.

  Stella could hear Alice banging away inside, like a bumper car in a junkyard. Alice wasn’t the screaming type. “Alice!” Stella shouted.

  Spuddle, who had been riding on top of the train car, zipped down and clung to the handle. “Um, excuse me—”

  “Not a good time, Spuddle,” Stella told him.

  “Oh, sorry, okay.” He zoomed back to the roof of the car.

  “Alice!” Stella shouted again. “I’m here! I’ll help you!”

  The crashing stopped for a moment. Then Alice cried, “Well, what’s the plan, then?”

  “Working on it!” Stella said.

  “It’s almost as if she isn’t grateful,” Anyway said.

  “Could you please be quiet unless you have something helpful to say?”

  “Why don’t you grab some of these vines?” Anyway suggested.

  Stella grabbed one. It crumbled in her grip. “Next?” she grunted.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.” Spuddle dipped and landed on Stella’s shoulder.

  “Still not a good time,” Stella told him.

  “All right.” He zipped back up to the top of the train.

  Her fingers strained at the edge of the door ledge; her toes ached in the tiny crevasse that held them. She could hear a furious Alice cursing inside the car. She had a very creative vocabulary. “Grab the emergency brake!” Stella shouted.

  “There isn’t an emergency brake!” Alice screamed back.

  “Of course there is!” Stella cried. “There has to be!”

  “This is a subway car in the middle of a Nightmare Forest on the Nightmare Line!” Alice countered. “It doesn’t have a brake! I feel like that’s kind of the point!”

  Spuddle chose that moment to land once again on Stella’s shoulder. “I’m afraid that what I have to tell you really can’t wait,” he announced.

  Stella blinked at him. “Go ahead.”

  “Um, the tracks end in about a hundred yards,” he said. “At the edge of a cliff.”

  Stella gaped at him.

  “I thought you should know.”

  “Thank you, Spuddle,” Anyway said from her pocket. “That was very helpful.”

  Spuddle smiled and curled his tail at the compliment. Then he darted away.

  Stella’s mind spun. There had to be an emergency brake. All subway cars had an emergency brake, and so far, every one she had traveled in on the Dreamway had been like the ones in real life. They were made of scraps from her mind, after all, pieces of her imagination. And, while Stella didn’t care much for stories, she understood mechanical things. All trains need an emergency brake, she told herself. Even a Nightmare train doesn’t want to get into a smashup. Not on purpose, anyway.

  Every fiber of Stella’s body was concentrated on clinging to the exterior of the Nightmare train as it rattled and bucked over the tracks. A stray branch tottered off the roof, nicking her on the cheek. But Stella paid no attention. She ignored the grasping trees as they reached out for her. Her mind was in a different place entirely: she was inside the subway car; she was remembering what an emergency brake looks like. There had to be one. There had to be.

  “Fifty yards!” Spuddle shouted.

  It’s red, Stella thought, bright, like a fire engine. And rectangular, made of metal, and with a handle wide enough to fit all your fingers through. STOP was painted in white block letters about an inch high. She held this in her mind, held it there with as much strength as she held on to the car with her fingers.

  Alice let out a shout, and a moment later, the universe began to scream. The brakes engaged and the subway car convulsed, bucking like a cat that someone has forced into a costume. Light flickered on the dead branches on either side as the brakes screeched, sending up sparks in a silver shower that looked like a fiery lawn sprinkler.

  “We’re not stopping!” Spuddle shouted. “Twenty yards!”

  Still, Stella clung to the end of the car. In her mind, she knew that tracks did not simply end. There would be a safety stop—a pylon, something concrete, something that would keep a train from going over the edge. . . .

  “Ten yards!”

  “We’re slowing down!” Anyway cried.

  “Not enough!” Spuddle screeched.

  Anyway burrowed down into her pocket, but Stella did not cover or even close her eyes. She looked around, frantically searching the edge of the forest for a solution, some way to slow the train. That is why her eyes were open to see a figure move in a tree twenty yards ahead. A moment later, a large black branch crashed onto the tracks. The train car slammed into it, and the wood jammed between the wheels and the rails.

  The train car screech trailed to a scraping wail and suddenly bucked, sending Stella flying. She landed on her shoulder between the tracks. Gravel scraped her skin as she scrambled to her knees.

  The subway car squatted, motionless, before her.

  “What happened?” Spuddle asked. He looked out over the vast cliff before them. “Is this heaven?”

  “Owwww,” groaned a voice from the other side of the subway door.

  “Alice! Are you okay?” Stella shouted.

  In response, the rear emergency exit door slid open. Alice stood in the doorway looking like someone who had just arm-wrestled a tornado. Her eyes closed slowly, then snapped open. “I’m trying to think of a witty reply to that question,” Alice admitted, “but I think my brain got scrambled.”

  “Oh, you’re so lucky!” Spuddle announced, flitting over to Alice. “Thank goodness for that branch!”

  But it wasn’t luck. Stella knew it wasn’t. She turned her gaze toward the tree and saw the dark shape crawling down the trunk.

  Anyway noticed her expr
ession. “What is it?” he asked as the large, dark shape landed at the base of the tree and started to move away.

  “Who’s there?” Stella shouted, and the figure froze. “Who is that?”

  The figure stepped out of the shadows, and Stella saw him clearly for the first time. It was a man wearing jeans and a filthy hooded sweatshirt. His dark eyes flashed with intelligence, not anger, as they gazed out from beneath long gray curls. “It’s nobody,” the man said. “Nobody to be afraid of, anyway,” he added.

  “Angry Pete?” Stella asked slowly.

  He didn’t reply.

  She tried again. “Pedro?”

  He studied her face, his expression a question mark.

  “You know my librarian,” Stella explained. “Nancy Slaughter.”

  “Oh.” Pedro looked confused.

  “You—saved us. Thank you.”

  Pedro shrugged. “Nobody deserves to be on that train,” he said simply.

  “How long have you—been here?” Stella asked.

  Pedro looked around. “Long time,” he said finally. “A very long time, I think.”

  “How did you get here?” Anyway asked. “You’re not even properly in a dream, and you’re not on a train—”

  “I found a way out of my dream,” Pedro said slowly. “But I can’t seem to find my way out of here. Been in the forest, seems like . . . forever. No way out.”

  “It’s that way.” Alice pointed toward the Memory Line, the direction they had come from.

  Pedro’s eyes held hers for a moment. Then he glanced over her shoulder and shuddered. “No.”

  “She’s right,” Anyway assured him. “The only way for you to get out is through the Memory Line. . . .”

  “I’m not going that way,” Pedro said simply.

  “You have to,” Stella said softly. “You don’t want to stay here, do you?”

  Angry Pete glared at her. “Of course I don’t want to stay here.”

  “All right, so then—” she prompted.

  “There’s things worse than this,” Angry Pete replied. His voice was a low growl, a warning. “Plenty worse.”

  The forest around them was silent, as if it were watching them. Stella wondered what horrors lurked in its depths and how it could possibly be less frightening than what Pedro might find on the Memory Line. Whatever that was, she realized, it must be horrible.

  Her heart ached for Pedro, and she realized that she could never be afraid of him again—not when he was so full of fear himself.

  “Do you know about the new Nightmare Line?” Stella asked, making her voice as gentle as she could. “Have you seen it?”

  His dark eyes grew guarded. “I’ve seen something,” he told them. “Don’t know what it is. But I’m not going in that direction, either. I’d rather stick to the woods.”

  “How do we get there?” Stella asked.

  “Don’t know how you get there,” Angry Pete replied. He turned away from her slowly and pointed toward the horizon. “But if you’re looking for it, there it is.”

  All Souls

  “LOOKS LIKE TERRIBLE WEATHER,” SPUDDLE observed. “And me without an umbrella.”

  Far above them, but still low in the sky, a cauldron of gunmetal clouds skulked and writhed. They seemed to hum, heavy and charged. As the four friends watched, a small spark of lightning flared in the depths.

  There was something strange about those clouds, Stella realized. But she couldn’t figure out what it was. She turned to ask Pedro about it, but he was already disappearing into the depths of the forest.

  “Pedro!” she called. “Pedro!” He did not slow down or even look back, and it made her shiver. It had not occurred to her before that moment that—perhaps—Cole wouldn’t want to leave the Dreamway. She turned toward the clouds, feeling a shadow of dread fall across her heart.

  “That’s not weather.” Anyway’s voice was low and careful.

  Stella’s mind, which had been busily trying to understand the clouds, finally managed to form them into a shape that made sense. After a moment, she gasped.

  The clouds were not, in fact, clouds at all. It was a black vortex, like a puncture wound in the sky.

  At the edge of the blackness hulked a collection of machinery clumped together to form a ring roughly the size of a baseball field and approximately the same shape as a large intestine. It looked cold and slimy, like the skin of an octopus, and—although it was, in fact, a machine that made up that circle—Stella had the uncomfortable feeling that it was alive. She felt as if it were looking at her and didn’t think much of what it saw . . . except, perhaps, as a snack.

  Anyway pulled out What’s map and unfolded it. Then he turned it over to the diagram on the back and squinted.

  Stella thought that the picture didn’t look much like what was in front of them. But her father always said that a diagram is sometimes just a representation of what is supposed to happen. It isn’t necessarily an illustration of what something looks like. She looked at the vortex and the machinery again. “It’s the transformer,” she said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Alice admitted.

  “It looks like there’s a way to get up to it,” Anyway pointed out, “from the other side of the canyon.”

  “Okay!” Spuddle said brightly. “So let’s go across!”

  “That’s easy for you,” Stella snapped at the dragonfly. “You can fly. The rest of us have a problem.”

  “Well.” Spuddle sounded hurt. “There is a bridge.”

  The others turned to have a look. To call this bridge “rickety” was to insult rickety bridges the world over. It looked like an art project by a three-year-old at nature camp—pointless string and sticks held together by ignorant tangles.

  “Are we supposed to walk across that?” Stella asked. “It’s impossible!” She turned to Anyway and Alice. “Tell him, you guys!”

  Alice gave her a level look. “Just because it’s impossible doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.”

  “Yes it does,” Stella cried. “That is literally what it means!”

  “Stop being literal,” Alice told her. She pointed at her own stony expression. “Does this face look literal to you? Does this place look literal to you?”

  “I have no idea how to answer that,” Stella replied. She looked back at the bridge. Part of her thought that there had to be another way.

  But even if there is, she realized, we’re running out of time. We might already be too late! She had to get to Cole, even if it was dangerous. With a deep breath, she took a step forward.

  “I’ll go first,” Anyway announced.

  “You are the lightest,” Spuddle agreed.

  Anyway glared at him. “I think you mean, ‘No, no, Anyway, don’t be foolish! I would be devastated if something terrible happened to you.’”

  “It’ll be fine! You just have to trust!” Spuddle insisted. “It’s the one thing they never expect in places like this!”

  Anyway scrambled down from Stella’s pocket and hopped over to the bridge. He stood at the edge for a long time. Finally, he put one tentative paw out and tested the rope. “Seems . . . okay,” he said dubiously. He climbed out. “It’s . . . pretty sturdy, actually.” He went a bit farther. “Much stronger than it looks.” He bounced up and down a few times.

  “I’ll try,” Alice said, and strode over to the bridge. There were two ropes, one at the height of each of her shoulders. She held on to these and placed a foot carefully on the twig and rope deck. She stepped out, balancing cautiously, gripping the hand ropes with white knuckles. After a few steps, she seemed to relax a bit. “Stella, Anyway is right—it’s better than it looks. Come on!”

  Stella was afraid of heights, and the rickety bridge looked alarmingly like something her brain had cooked up deliberately to scare her to death. “It’s a dream,” she told herself as she walked to the edge. “It’s only trying to frighten you.” She stepped out. The rope bridge swayed and sank a few inches under her weight, but did not creak
, groan, or make any other alarming noises.

  It isn’t very hard to balance on a tightrope when you have something to cling to, but it can get challenging when the rope is not tight and neither are the things you’re grasping. There were a lot of “whoas” and “yikeses,” but with some awkward flailing and pulling and splayed legs and arms, Stella centimetered (inched was too strong a word) her way across the crevasse. The diagram sat tucked safely in her pocket as she shuffled awkwardly forward. The bridge was narrow; each foot had to be placed directly in front of the foot behind. Stella tripped once, sending the bridge swaying.

  Alice and Anyway let out a shout and clung to the sides.

  “Sorry!” Stella called.

  “No problem,” Alice said over her shoulder. “Just move slowly.”

  “That’s how I always move,” Stella replied. She was grateful that her arms and legs had more freedom in the Dreamway. In the real world, she never could have managed the crossing.

  It was relatively easy passage for Anyway, who could simply scamper in his usual way. He could cling to the ropes with all four feet.

  “Oh, this is wonderful!” Spuddle said as he buzzed near Stella’s ear. “It’s working out perfectly!”

  “Stop being so chipper,” Anyway grumbled.

  “I’m encouraging you!” Spuddle insisted as he buzzed forward to join Anyway. “You’re almost halfway along!”

  “I don’t want to be encouraged!” Anyway insisted. “Go encourage Alice.”

  But this only served to convince the dragonfly that he simply wasn’t offering enough encouragement. “You can do it you can do it you can do it!” he chanted, all the while turning somersaults in the air near Anyway’s head.

  “Look—get off!” Anyway said, swatting at the fly.

  “You’re more than halfway there!” Spuddle did another flip.

  Anyway stood on his hind legs and flapped his arms as Spuddle zipped past.