Dreamland (17 page)

“Can you tell me how to find my mother or not?” Dea said. She was trying not to cry. She'd imagined somehow she would simply
feel
her mother's presence. She'd imagined she would take her mother's hand and draw her out of whatever dark place was holding her.

And then what? They'd walk out of the dream together, triumphant? Dea didn't even know how her mom had gotten
in
. Not by walking, certainly. Walking was just like dreaming, in a way—the physical body remained in the real world while the mind traveled. But Miriam had entered the dream world completely.

“You won't find her unless the king wants you to find her,” he said. “You'll need to take it up with him.”

Dea was on the verge of tears. She channeled the feeling into anger, forced her rage to take shape. “What are you talking about?” she said. “What king? What is this? Who—who are you?”

He shook his head again. “It's who
you
are that matters.”

“Stop speaking in riddles.” She was losing it. She no longer understood the rules; she didn't understand who these people were, and how Connor's dream could possibly extend so far in so much detail. “You aren't real,” she said, although without conviction. “None of this is real.”

“Oh no?” The boy moved barely an inch closer but Dea stopped breathing. She'd never been so close to any boy, except
Connor. But standing next to Connor was like huddling under a warm blanket: a fuzzy whole-body feeling that made her feel stupid and happy.

Standing next to this boy, whoever he was, was like putting a hand on an electrified fence: a blast of voltage that left her dizzy and disoriented. Before she could stop him, he reached out and traced his thumb along her lower lip. Her body reacted. She couldn't help it. His touch made her feel like she was standing beneath a sky full of fireworks. Like she was a firework—all light and explosion. “Are you sure?”

She wrenched away, shaken. No one else had moved. The whole group was as still as a painting, and she knew that no one would help her, either. She turned, blinking away tears, and started back in the direction she'd come.

“Wait.” The boy called her back and she stopped. Maybe he regretted how he'd spoken to her. He came toward her, holding a leather flask. He stopped when they were still separated by several feet, as if he knew he'd crossed a line.

“Water,” he said, extending the flask to her. For just a second, he looked very young. “You might need it.”

Dea nearly didn't take it. But when he didn't move, just stood there with one arm out and a penitent expression on his face, she did. She wouldn't thank him, though.

“You better hurry,” he said. “The winds are changing.” Then he turned abruptly and made his way back down the hill toward the encampment.

Dea set off again, holding the flask by its neck. The boy was right about one thing: the wind had picked up and mostly eradicated her tracks. She started walking, wiping sweat from her
eyes, scanning the sky for vultures. She disliked the birds, but they were still birds, and might be useful.

She was suddenly desperate to find a doorway out of the dream, to wake up next to Connor in the small motel room, with its sputtering heat and faint smell of detergent, to return to the real world with its leaky toilets and boring school days and inconveniences and dangers and familiarity.

As the panic built, grew, pushed at her chest, Dea started to run. Sand, sand in every direction. How far was she from the nearest way out? How far had she come? What if Connor had already woken, and the city had fallen and turned to more sand? The idea chilled her, even as she blinked sweat from her eyes, struggling up steep desert peaks, her breath rasping in her chest.

Impossible. This
was
Connor's dream. It must be. The alternative was too strange, too frightening: that there were dreams that existed in a kind of permanence. That there were dreams that existed with no one to dream them at all.

And that she, Dea, was in one of them.

Then—a miracle—she crested a hill and saw the dappled shadows of thousands of holes, some of them just opening, some of them disappearing as the sand shifted, moved, like a slowly flowing ocean. Even from a distance she could see her pink sweatshirt, occasionally lifting in the wind, snapping an arm as if to wave at her.

She hurried forward. But as she moved, the sand moved with her, foaming and sliding under her feet, barreling down toward the pits like a wave moving toward shore, so she could barely keep on her feet.
A landslide
. Dea grabbed hold of her
sweatshirt as her legs were whipped out from underneath her. She went sliding over the edge of the pit on a coursing wave of sand, coughing dust from her lungs as her fingers found the cold metal rungs of the ladder. She clung there, feet kicking in open air, as sand continued to drum down on her head and shoulders. Far below her was the distant landscape of Connor's dream. Chicago had disappeared entirely. She was dangling above a dizzying funhouse landscape, a city made not of buildings but of enormous roller coasters and tents as large as mountains.

The sand was coming so fast now it had obliterated all the light above her.

The pit was collapsing.

Connor was waking up.

She lost her grip on the ladder and fell, or slid, or was pushed—she didn't know. There was sand in her mouth, her eyes, her ears. She clawed for open air and came up blinking, coughing, struggling to stand. But before she could get to her feet, a roller coaster fell in slow motion, a giant iron skeleton coming apart. Its collapse sent out a booming echo so loud it knocked her off balance. Now the sky was breaking apart in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle being disassembled: sand poured through the cracks, a steady downpour of it.

She got to her feet but made it only a few staggering steps before another structure fell, before the ground trembled and bucked and sent her to her knees. Up again. A surge came toward her—a shimmering high wall of white sand—and before she could move or turn or cover her face, she was trapped. There was sand in her shirt, in her nose, sand choking her. She fought blindly against the sucking weight of thousands and thousands
of tons of sand—sand shaved over centuries from dream-mountains. Then she was spit out, tossed into the fine brightness of the air. She rolled onto her back, hacking, as the sand continued to bury the dream.

Most of the dream was gone—rubbed away, leaving only a faint smear where the colored funhouse tents had been, an aureole of dust and destruction. She would never make it. Still, she took a step forward, and then another: moving mechanically, instinctively, without hope.

It hurt to breathe. She had never been so thirsty. She uncapped the water that the boy had given her, but before she could drink, the ground shifted again. She stumbled, landing on her hands and knees. The water seeped into the ground, a dark line of it, like a snake being sucked underground. She grabbed for it, trying to palm some of the wet sand into her mouth, desperate for even a drop, a taste, of water.

Instead, the sand gripped her fingers, ate at her wrists and arms, sucked her downward. She let out a short cry and then was jerked to the ground, face pressed to the hot sand, as a whirling, unseen pressure continued working at her, spiraling her downward, as if an invisible monster were sucking her slowly through a straw.

Then she realized: a door. The water had made a door.

But it was unlike any door she had ever used. She was being pulled headfirst into the ground. She shut her eyes and held her breath. She was kicking at the air, and then her legs were pulled under, too. She was caught, trapped, buried in the sand, and for a second she believed the boy had tricked her, and she would die.

Boom
. Even through the muffling sand, she heard the last of
Connor's dream-city falling.
Boom
.

Just when she knew she couldn't hold her breath any longer—just when she was ready to give up, and float away—there was a small, subtle shift in the pressure around her. She gasped and tasted air. She kicked out and felt the tangle of blankets around her ankles.

She sat up, stifling a cry, as Connor came awake beside her.

Boom.

For a second, still disoriented and terrified, she thought the echoes had followed her into real life. Then she realized that someone was knocking on the door. Her eyes went to the clock on the bedside table: 7:35 a.m.

“Connor?” A woman's voice, unfamiliar. His stepmom? But Connor looked confused, too. “Dea?”

Connor eased out of bed, gesturing for Dea to stay put when she moved to follow him. At the window, he parted the cheap curtains with a finger and peered outside. Then he reared back quickly, as if something had bitten his nose, just as the woman started knocking again.

“I just want to talk to you. Five minutes. Ten, tops.” Even through the door, Dea thought she heard a sigh. “Listen, you're not going to get rid of me, okay? I'll wait around all day. So you might as well let me in.”

“Damn it,” Connor muttered. His hair was sticking straight up, and sometime in the middle of the night, he'd lost a sock between the sheets. Now one of his feet was bare. Dea wanted to go to him and give him a hug. But she stayed where she was, still half-dizzy from walking.

“Who is it?” she whispered. Her throat was raw, as if she'd really inhaled sand.

But he just shook his head and moved to open the door, even as the knocking started up again. They'd locked the door twice and put the chain up the night before, and it took Connor a minute to work the door open. When he did, Dea was momentarily dazzled by a vision of pale blue sky and wintry sun. A beautiful Thanksgiving.

“Christ.” The woman who stepped into the room was weirdly familiar, although Dea was sure they'd never met. She was balancing a cardboard tray of Dunkin' Donuts coffee—four cups, Dea noticed—in one hand. With the other, she unwound an enormous scarf from around her neck, carefully disentangling the fabric from a pair of dangly earrings. “You're a hard person to get ahold of, you know that?”

And then Dea knew her. She recognized the voice. Kate Patinsky, who was writing a book, who'd been trying to talk to Connor for days, who'd tried to visit Dea in the hospital. Kate was younger than Dea had expected. She'd been imagining a woman in her forties or fifties, with the long snout of a
bloodhound and the kind of mean, calculating expression that Morgan Devoe and Hailey Madison had perfected long ago. But Kate looked only a few years older than Dea. She was wearing fingerless gloves and several layers: a T-shirt, an army jacket, an ivory wool peacoat sporting several coffee stains.

“Do you ever give up?” Connor hadn't moved from the door—maybe he was hoping Kate would take the hint and leave again.

“No,” she said, finally unraveling the scarf and tossing it onto the foot of the unused bed. “I brought coffee,” she said. The tray she put on top of the TV. She reached into her enormous purse and extracted a crumpled Dunkin' Donuts bag. “And bagels. Mind if I sit?”

“Yes,” Connor said.

Kate ignored that. She took two of the coffees for herself, leaving the other two in the tray. When she caught Dea staring, she winked. “Only fair,” she said. “I've been up all night.”

“Why are you here?” Connor asked bluntly.

Kate sighed. “Look. I know you think I'm out for blood.”

“Aren't you?” Connor asked, crossing his arms.

Kate looked up at him. Her eyes were big and warm and brown, like a cow's. “I'm out for the truth,” she said. “This case has been my life. It made a huge impact on me. It's one of the reasons I wanted to study criminology in the first place. The way they treated you . . .” She broke off, shaking her head. After another moment of hesitating, Connor crossed the room and snatched up the coffees—still glaring at Kate, as if he wanted her to know that he resented her just the same. Connor passed Dea one of the coffees and the bag of bagels. The bagels were
warm on her lap and the coffee was amazing: delicately flavored, swimming with cream. She almost—almost—couldn't hate Kate Patinsky anymore.

“How did you find us?” Connor asked.

Kate had settled on the unused bed and produced about seven packets of sugar from the pocket of her peacoat. She emptied them, one after the other, into her coffee. “Wasn't hard,” she said. “This one”—she jerked her chin toward Dea—“makes a break for it and at the same time,
you
disappear. It doesn't take a genius to figure out you'd be together. And I figured you wouldn't drive more than three, four hours without stopping.” She popped the lid back on the coffee and took a long, gratified slurp. “I called
fifty-six
motels before I found someone who said he'd seen you.”

The desk clerk. Jesus. Dea seriously regretted the hundred bucks she'd given him.

“Connor,” Dea said, anxiety prickling in her stomach. “If
she
found us—”

“That means you can be found,” Kate interrupted her. “Exactly. I don't want to waste your time.”

“What do you want?” Connor asked. His voice was hard, and he
looked
hard, too: his face chiseled out of gray light, like a stranger's.

Kate leaned forward, elbows to knees. “I told you. I want the truth.” The weirdest thing was that Dea believed her. “Look, Connor, I understand why you've been avoiding me. Shit, your uncle tried to have me run out of Fielding.” Something flashed in her eyes, a momentary anger that made Kate look unexpectedly older. “But I don't care about your uncle. You may think
I don't care about your family, that I've made myself a pest—”

“I don't think that,” Connor interjected. “I
know
that.”

Kate smiled faintly. “Fair. But I do care. I care about the victims.” Connor flinched when she said
victims
, as if he still wasn't used to hearing his mother and brother described that way. Her voice got softer. “I care about your mom. I care about your little brother. And I care about you, too.” This made Connor look up. Kate shrugged. “You were a victim. Not in the same way. But definitely a victim.”

Connor's eyes were hard to read. His mouth started moving, as if he was having to chew up his words before saying them. “So . . . you don't think I did it?”

“I
know
you didn't do it.” Kate paused, letting that sink in. “That's why I'm writing this book. This case should never have gone cold. Living witness, closed crime scene, likely committed by someone the victims knew. Someone screwed up big time. I want to know who, and why.”

Connor looked away. “It's over,” he said. “What's done is done. What's the point?”

“The
point
,” Kate said, “is that your family deserves answers. You deserve answers.” She hesitated. “Don't you want to know?”

Connor turned away abruptly and moved to the window. For a second he stood there without speaking. Finally, he turned around again. “All right,” he said at last. “What do you want from me?”

Kate set her coffee by her feet and spread her hands. “Just to talk,” she said. “Take me through it. Tell me what you remember. Help me, Connor. I can help you, too.” Her eyes flicked to Dea. “Looks like you two could use it.”

In the silence that followed, Dea found herself hoping that Connor would say yes. She realized that she trusted Kate implicitly, now that she'd met her—believed in her, too, though she didn't really see how Kate could help them. Maybe just by finding out the truth, for Connor's sake. So the nightmares would stop.

The idea flashed: Did that mean the monsters would stop, too?

Outside, Dea heard the muffled sound of voices. It took a moment for her brain to bring them into focus, but then she stood up, her heart rocketing into her mouth, her body high-wired on alert.

The clerk was babbling excuses. “They paid cash, I had no idea they were in trouble, I never would've let them in. Don't tell my boss, okay?
”

“My uncle,” Connor said, even before he turned back to the window to confirm. He yanked the curtains closed all the way, leaning against them, as if that would keep the police from finding them. “My
uncle
,” he repeated, staring at Dea with a look of pure panic. A second later, someone pounded against the door and Connor flinched.

“Connor? Connor, open up. I know you're in there.”

Kate was on her feet. “You,” she said in a low voice, pointing at Dea, then jerking her thumb toward the bathroom. “Window. Now.”

Connor cleared his throat and spoke up, so he could be heard through the door. “One second. Jesus Christ. Stop shouting.” Casually, as if running off to some godforsaken motel were totally normal. As if his uncle had woken him early on a Saturday.

“Connor, I'm serious.” The door shook on its hinges.

“
Now
,” Kate repeated in a whisper, snapping her fingers in Dea's direction. Dea cast one look at Connor. He nodded, mouthed
Go
. She grabbed the envelope of cash from the bedside table and stuffed it in her waistband.

The door handle rattled.

“I'm putting my boxers on. Give me a minute.” Connor directed his words to the men on the other side of the door.

She didn't bother with the shoes—she could barely walk in them anyway, much less run. She slipped into the bathroom and closed the door just as the cops poured into the motel room: rapid-fire voices; walkie-talkie static; Connor's uncle's voice, loud and outraged. “What were you thinking?” he kept saying.

And the phrase, endlessly repeated, like a terrible drumbeat: “Where is she? Where is she, Connor?”

Kate was talking over everyone, trying to be heard. “It was my fault. I thought if I could get finally get Connor one-on-one . . .”

There was only one way out: a small, dirt-encrusted window just above the toilet, its frame warped from years of sweltering summertime heat. Dea leaned against the window frame. For a second, it stuck, and she experienced a moment of total fear, full-body panic, like being caught again in the stifling mouth of airless sand.

She pushed. Outside the door, the voices crested and changed melodies, triumphant and terrifying: “The shoes. Look at these shoes. She's here somewhere. Find her.”

Find her.

The window released. She shoved it open, striking out the screen with a palm. It landed with a clatter. She doubted that
anyone had heard, but it wouldn't matter anyway: in a few seconds, they would find her. Already, she could hear voices coalescing, massing around a single word:
bathroom
.

Find her. Bathroom.

She climbed up on the toilet and went headfirst through the window, into the cold gray air, struggling momentarily to fit her hips through the frame. She fell the last foot to the pavement, keeping her head protected, skinning her arms and elbows. She barely felt it. She was on her feet. The ground was freezing but she didn't feel that, either.

She'd emerged at the back of the motel, cluttered with Dumpsters and accumulated trash. A narrow spit of pavement ran up against bare fields, glittering coldly in the new day. Through a line of thin trees, she saw rundown houses, mobile homes, a bunch of rusted cars perched on cinderblocks. Beyond them, she knew, would be more fields, more farms, more woods and hiding places.

She ran.