Dreamland (18 page)

She wouldn't get very far and she knew it. She wasn't in great shape—she never had been, because of her heart—and her feet were cut up and swollen with cold.
She
was cold. Once she stopped running, she was freezing. Her nose ran and her eyes stung. The wind felt like it was cutting her straight down the middle.

Still, she managed to evade the cops all morning. She stuck to the woods whenever she could; when she couldn't, she cut across backyards and ducked under laundry lines where towels swelled like puffed-up sails, always staying off the roads. When she was so cold she thought she might die, she found
an abandoned Volvo and climbed inside to get warm for a bit, stuffing her feet into the holes in the upholstery until feeling returned to her toes.

She wasn't thinking about leaving Connor behind, or how she would reach him, or what would happen to her next. If she began worrying, she would lose hope. She focused instead on her immediate problems: she needed shoes, a jacket, and a hat, or she would die out here.

It was risky, but she decided to stop in the next town she came to: Sawyerville, probably four times the size of Fielding, a dumpy cluster of bars and big-box chain stores. Shoes first. Her toes had lost all feeling again, and she was worried that she might get frostbite and end up having to amputate with a penknife like she'd seen someone stranded in an avalanche do once on TV. She stopped at a Lady Foot Locker—not her first choice for style, but she was in no position to be choosy.

“What happened to your shoes?” was the first thing the sales clerk, a guy with a shiny, shellacked helmet of blond hair and the look of a choirboy, said to her.

“I was camping,” she lied quickly. “They got stolen.” She picked out a pair of sneakers and a whole bag of fluffy white socks. She felt a thousand times better once she was wearing shoes, like she'd graduated from freak runaway to normal human in less than five seconds. The store was bright and overheated, and even though she needed to get moving, she was hesitant to leave.

“It's a little cold to be camping, isn't it?” he said. His eyes went buggy when she pulled out a roll of cash, but he didn't say anything.

“Not with the right equipment,” she said. It was another improvised line, a lie of convenience, but then an idea struck her. They'd crossed into Ohio last night. They couldn't be very far from the border, and Ohio's Largest Corn Maze. “How far are we from DeWitt?”

He shrugged. “Ten miles. Twelve, maybe.”

A woman with teased hair and lips painted baby pink was doing a very bad job of pretending she wasn't paying Dea any attention. Had Dea been recognized? “Thanks,” Dea said. She half expected the woman to call out to her as she moved for the door, but the woman continued moving through the racks of athletic clothing, flipping tags, and Dea relaxed as she stepped out into the sunshine.

She found a Walmart. She was beginning to think that in America, you were never more than ten miles from a Walmart. Her mom had spent years railing against the destruction of the American landscape, comparing big-box stores to massive pimples exploding the pus of same-old, same-old all over the country. But they came in handy when you were a teenage runaway.

If she ever saw her mother again, she'd tell her.

Because of the holiday, the store was practically empty. Dea went directly to the section for sportsmen, people who were used to toughing it out. She bought a big backpack designed for hikers, a water bottle and a sleeping bag, a tent, a heavy jacket, a hat and gloves, a portable kerosene stove and a knife, hair dye and scissors, sunglasses, changes of underwear, a zip-up fleece, thermal underwear, a flashlight, and a can opener. She spent nearly four hundred dollars, but she wasn't too worried. She still had enough, more than enough, to cross the country on a
Greyhound or even book a flight. And there was nowhere she wanted to go, anyway. The answers were here, with Connor. With the monsters.

In the parking lot, she snapped the tags off her jacket, hat, and gloves. Once she was geared up, she could have been anyone. She was a faceless, shapeless girl, bloated with layers of winter clothing. She felt better about being on the roads now. She was floating in plain sight, just another drifter moving across the vast shiny scars of pavement. Still, she stopped at the next gas station she came to and asked to use the bathroom. She hacked off her hair before it dyeing it—ignoring the guy who started pounding five minutes in, demanding she open the door because he had to pee—fearing and hoping every time she looked in the mirror that she might see her mother looking back. Instead, she saw a girl's face, drawn and haunted, underneath a messy shock of black hair. She barely recognized herself.

She was starving. She moved through the aisles of the gas station. She bought SpaghettiOs and Coke, candy and bags of chips, feeling an unexpected burst of joy, of richness, with her money still strapped comfortably in her waistband. She was too hungry to make it far, and ducked behind a Dumpster to set up her cookstove before realizing she'd forgotten to buy a pot. She heated the can directly over the stove until the paper label began to singe and curl, then ate the SpaghettiOs with her fingers, crouching in the thin, cold air, feeling at once exposed and totally anonymous. How many people disappeared every year? How many people dropped out of sight, wandering, forever scraping out a living? Probably thousands.

When she was satisfied, she washed her fingers with water carefully poured from the bottle, then repacked her backpack
and shouldered it. She stopped a guy pumping fuel in an old Chevy truck and asked for directions. She set off in the direction he indicated—toward DeWitt, and the maze.

By the time she arrived, the sun was already setting, and the maze was lit a reddish gold. From a distance it looked as though it had been cast in bronze. She estimated it was four or five o'clock, and very quiet—the kind of stillness and silence that comes only in wintertime, in places abandoned or forgotten. All across the country, people would be gathering around dining room tables heaped with golden-skinned turkey and cranberries glimmering like crimson jewels. Or maybe they were already done eating, and were sitting in darkened rooms, pants unbuttoned, complaining about that last piece of pie; watching TV, washing dishes, brewing coffee, sobering up.

She was on the other side, now: the animal side, a place of shadow and slow time, a part of the world untouched by human intervention. She might as well be a gopher, an owl, or a rat.

She paused to get out her flashlight before entering the maze. She didn't want to get caught in the dark before making camp, fumbling for supplies by touch. Though she had navigated the maze once already—she pushed aside the memory of that day, its warmth and sun, the lightness of Connor's fingers and quickness of his smile—in the dark it looked grotesque and strange. After half an hour of fruitless wandering, she began to fear the maze was changing shape around her, penning her in. But that was the point: she would be hard to find, impossible to surprise. She would be safe in the middle of the maze.

At last she made it to the center, and the small metal sign that congratulated visitors for untangling the maze and reminded
them that smoking and littering were forbidden. It was totally dark. She set up camp fumblingly, painstakingly, gripping her flashlight under her chin so she could have use of both hands. She had to take off her gloves, and her fingers were soon stiff with cold. Her breath made clouds in the air. Above her, the stars looked like flakes of snow that had gotten stuck in the black tar of the sky.

She had camped with her mom a few times, when money had run low, when they were between towns—and, Dea thought, probably between cons. Despite what she now knew of her mom, she couldn't bring herself to feel angry. She couldn't even resent all of those wrenching displacements, the sudden relocations, the nights eating shitty gas station sandwiches and sleeping in the car or in a tent set up hastily on the side of a no-name road.

Dea wanted Miriam back. She would take it all—she would live it all again—if she could just have her mom back.

Her earlier feelings of freedom had been replaced by a deep loneliness, a physical ache, as if someone had carved a space between her stomach and her chest. She was all alone. There was not a sound anywhere, no signs of life or movement, except for the rustle of small animals in the dark. It could have been a thousand years in the past, or a thousand in the future, after all humans were wiped out. She might be the only person left in all the world.

She knew it must still be early, but she was tired, and she didn't want to think anymore. She crawled into her tent and shook out her sleeping bag. Eventually, she stopped shivering, and the hollow inside of her became a long pit, and she fell, and slept.

A day passed, and then another. Still, Connor didn't come. It was stupid to think that he would remember a throwaway conversation they'd had nearly two months earlier, and even stupider to hope that he would come and find her.

She risked dialing Connor's cell phone, from an ancient payphone she spotted a mile from the maze, sitting in front of a shuttered hair salon, which was now scrawled over with graffiti. The receiver was sticky in her hand, but she still squeezed tightly, as if she could somehow reach Connor by touch. The phone rang and rang and then clicked over to voicemail. The second time she called, a woman—Connor's stepmother, Dea assumed—picked up after the third ring.

“Hello?” she said breathlessly. Then: “Who is this? Who is this?” Her voice was shrill and it made Dea's head hurt. She hung up.

She called Gollum's house several times, hoping to reach Gollum directly, but someone else always got to the phone first, usually Richie or Mack, and, once, Gollum's father. She always hung up. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she wasn't sure who she could trust, and she didn't want to get Gollum in trouble. She was sure that if the cops knew Gollum had been in touch with Dea, they wouldn't leave her alone. One time, both Gollum and Richie picked up simultaneously, and before Dea could second-guess herself, she blurted out “corn maze” before hanging up. Immediately, she felt like an idiot. She hadn't even given Gollum time to recognize her voice. But when she dialed back, it was Gollum's dad who answered.

She wished she'd thought to take Kate Patinsky's number.

She was bored, which she hadn't expected. She hadn't realized it would be possible to be so constantly anxious and simultaneously so flat-out bored that she almost wished the thing she was afraid of would happen, just so that
something
would. She thought this must be what it felt like to go to war, to spend hours playing cards and choking on the thick dust of a foreign desert, almost wishing that a bomb would explode.

She hiked to the nearest gas station twice, not because she was low on supplies, but because it broke up the hours and gave her something to do. But the second time, she caught the guy behind the register giving her funny looks, and figured she could go back only once, maybe twice more before he started asking questions. Then she would have to move on. She'd pack up and head south.

But not yet. Just in case.

Her schedule was slowly flipping. It was better to walk the roads at night, hit a diner when she needed to get warm, slip between the faceless shifting crowds of truckers doing their cross-country hauls, and gray-faced strippers, makeup harsh under the lights, eating pancakes at three a.m. She slept most of the day, swimming through the hours, trying not to think too hard.

On her third day in the maze, Dea woke to the sound of voices. She rocketed up in her sleeping bag, fumbling for her knife, which was stupid, because she would never be able to stab anyone and she knew it. She unzipped the tent flap and eased out into the open, careful not to make any noise, blinking in the bright light. It was clear and cold, not a cloud in the sky, shadows drawn starkly, like cardboard cutouts plastered to the ground.

She heard a child squeal and a mother speak sharply. She relaxed, but just a little. She'd thought the cops had tracked her down again, but it was just a family, exploring the maze despite the cold. Still, if they found her, they'd be sure to call someone—the police, most likely—and report the girl living alone at the center of Ohio's Largest Corn Maze.

She stood up and began hastily dismantling her tent before realizing it was no use. The voices were already so close, she could make out individual words: the low, sarcastic drawl of a teenage girl, complaining that it was too cold and she was hungry; the shrieks of a younger child; the father and mother arguing about whether to go right or left. She stood, rigid and terrified, waiting to be discovered. But then the voices receded, and Dea knew the family had given up and had decided to
backtrack. She stayed where she was, hardly breathing, until the roar of their car engine had faded. Then, struck by an idea, she stood and moved into the deep shadow of the maze, hugging her jacket tighter.

She was in luck: the little kid had dropped a glove, a red fleece mitten so small Dea could fit only three fingers inside of it, and still faintly warm from the child's grip. She tucked the mitten inside her jacket pocket, stupidly happy. She would walk today, as soon as possible. Her body was craving it, a compulsion she didn't want to think about too closely. She needed to keep her strength up.

She retreated into her tent, pulling the sleeping bag all the way over her head so that it blocked the light filtering through the nylon walls. She felt the mitten, beating through the fabric of her jacket like a second heart. She knew it would be many hours before the little girl's bedtime, but she had nothing else to do. She waited, her mind revolving slowly around the idea of the mitten, and the idea of the girl who'd possessed it, waiting for a break or a change. She drifted in and out of sleep. The sun passed overhead.

And eventually, she felt a change, the dark tangle of another mind rushing toward her, like the ground coming closer in a dream about falling. She leapt with her mind; she reached out to push; and after a brief wrangle, a sense of entanglement, she was in.

She hadn't walked a kid's dream in a while—not since she was a kid. Kids' dreams were erratic, often fractured, and moved too quickly to be satisfying. She was relieved that this dream was simple and relatively orderly.

Dea was standing behind a large hedge. This was the child's
defense, her attempt to prevent a stranger's intrusion. Beyond the hedge, Dea saw a group of kids tearing around a pool deck. Dark shapes were moving fleet-fast through the water—more kids, Dea assumed, until one of the shapes surfaced and she saw glistening dark skin and a set of teeth. Some kind of sea creature, then.

She felt a light touch on her elbow. She spun around, startled, and swallowed a scream.

It was the boy. The boy with honeyed eyes and a tangle of long brown hair, the one who had given her the water in Connor's dream.

In
Connor's
dream.

“Why are you following me?” Dea took an instinctive step backward, colliding with the hedge. The leaves slithered away, like a nest of snakes disturbed by a stone. “And
how
?”

“Calm down, okay?” the boy said, holding up both hands as if to reassure her he wasn't holding a weapon. He sighed. “Look, I'm trying to help.”

“You can help me by leaving me alone,” Dea said.

The boy raised an eyebrow. “You want to find your mother, don't you?”

Dea went cold. “What do you know about my mother?” Then: “Before, you told me I couldn't find her.”

“I told you that you
wouldn't
find her, unless the king wanted you to.” The boy paused, watching Dea searchingly. “She must have been taken through the mirrors. It's the fastest way into the city from your world. If you want to find her, you'll have to go in after her.”

Dea felt pressure behind her eyes and realized she was about to cry. She didn't know what was real anymore—she
didn't know what to believe.

“It's just a dream,” she remembered her mother had whispered, the first time Dea had walked a nightmare and seen a tidal wave of mud and human bones barreling blackly toward her. “Just a dream.” Now she found herself saying the same words again, out loud, as if they contained a protective spell that could help her.

“Just a dream?” the boy repeated. He looked faintly annoyed. “I'm as real as you are. We all are.”

“We?” Above her, Dea saw three birds, bellies flashing red against the blue sky. Harbingers. She should leave—she'd taken what she needed, sucked in as much strength as she could. But she couldn't move. She was transfixed by the boy's eyes, like two hard candies, and by the black brushstrokes of his eyelashes. By his skin, deeply tanned, and the faint white scar above his left eyebrow. Real. The word kept drilling in her head like an alarm.

“There are more of us,” the boy said, shrugging. Like it was no big deal. Like it was obvious. “Millions more, in the city. Masters and slaves and pits to hold them. Servants, pickers, barkeeps, bankers.”

“That's impossible.” The dream around Dea was shifting. Now the hedges webbed together, and became curtains of heavy velvet. They were standing backstage, in the stifling heat. Onstage, the little girl was flying without wings while an invisible audience applauded. “The dreams . . . collapse. Everything falls.”

“Not everything.” It was so dark, Dea could barely make out the angles of the boy's face, a bit of light from an unseen source touching his cheeks and chin. He smelled like leather, like
campfire and smoke. “People dream, and when they wake up, their dreams collapse. That's what makes a picker's job dangerous.” He smiled slightly, as if he was proud of this. “But there's more. Certain things are left. Like . . . rubble. Residue. A whole world of things is left. You saw some of it. You
walked
it. Even the desert goes on for days.”

“So where did it all come from?” Dea asked bluntly. She was unreasonably angry. “Who dreamed it? And when?”

“Who dreamed
your
world?” The boy was standing so close, Dea could smell him: sun-baked leather and salt and something she couldn't identify, something deep and earthy. “Look, I have to go.” Onstage, the little girl thudded to the ground. She tried to fly again, lifting her arms, bawling. Nothing. The audience began to boo and jeer. “I have to get back,” the boy said, in a different tone. “You should go, too. Remember what I said about the mirrors. I'm on your side. I'll be watching for you.”

The boy pressed something into Dea's palm. Dea opened her hand and saw a coil of soft leather. But just as quickly it changed, and became a moth—and then, expanding, a bird with feathers of soft velvet folds, and eyes winking like buttons. It hovered briefly above her palm, and then took off, swooping off into the dark.

“See you later,” he said. Then he turned around and vanished. He moved into the dark, or became the dark, Dea didn't know which. She felt the sudden brush of wingtips; the velvet bird swooped past her cheek, and she followed it. One step, two steps, into darkness.

Then the bird vanished through a fissure between the heavy curtains, and Dea knew she'd found a doorway out. She
elbowed past the curtains, choking on the sudden sensation of fabric in her mouth, pouring down her throat, and woke up sweating in her sleeping bag, the fabric stuck to her mouth, her zipper pinching the skin of her neck. She sat up, gasping, unzipping her jacket, swallowing against the phantom sensation of choking. It was still dark outside but she knew she wouldn't go back to sleep.

She crawled into the open air and stood, sucking in deep breaths, grateful for the wind. Still, she could feel a phantom fluttering pressure against her palm. She grabbed a flashlight from her backpack and started into the maze. The wind whispered and hissed through the dried corn husks. She thought of what the boy had said.

We're as real as you are . . .

Who dreamed
your
world?

She saw a rat, frozen, dark-eyed, in the beam of her flashlight—she yelped and it scurried off quickly, its tail slithering in the dried leaves. The rats grew big out here, in the fields, feeding off mice and the litter from passing cars. She walked more quickly, suddenly eager for the bright lights of the gas station, for the stink of gasoline and the burnt smell of all-night coffee and shriveled hot dogs rotating on spits, where she could at least feel like a person, and pretend that she was just another normal girl, stopping late-night for a bag of chips and a soda.

It was a good mile and a half to the gas station, walking next to the highway and then down a thin ribbon of concrete that passed for an exit ramp. The night clerk was the same as always, a guy a few years older than she was, who might have been good-looking except for his low-lidded eyes, like a lizard's.
He was probably stoned. She could feel him watching her as she moved through the aisles, picking up random supplies, lingering, grateful for the ritual.

“Hey,” he said, when she went to pay. Her stomach knotted up. She didn't respond, hoping he would take the hint and stop talking. He didn't. “You live around here or something?”

“Where's the bathroom?” she blurted out, to avoid having to answer, though she knew where the bathroom was and had, in fact, washed her hair in the sink two days earlier. He pointed, looking vaguely disappointed.

The light in the bathroom was broken, and flickered on and off, creating a strobe effect and plunging her at intervals into long seconds of darkness. She locked the door and leaned against it. The strangled feeling had returned. She had no choice: she'd have to move. Which meant that she was officially on the run, possibly forever.

Like mother, like daughter.

She stepped to the sink and ran the faucet, cupping her hand under the water and drinking, suddenly parched. She splashed water on her face and looked up just as the lights flickered off once again. Her image in the mirror was suddenly transformed, all holes and dark planes, and she thought of standing backstage with the girl and seeing faint light reflect off the white of her teeth.

The light went on again. Now it was just Dea in the mirror, water clinging to her eyebrows and upper lip.

She must have been taken through the mirrors.

You'll have to go in after her.

She reached out, very cautiously, and touched the mirror with a finger. She didn't know what she expected, but she felt
nothing but smooth, cold glass. She jerked a hand away, as if she'd been burned, and then exhaled. Stupid. She was going crazy.

And yet—and yet—her mother had come to her in the mirror at the hospital.