Dreamland (6 page)

She had two friends now. It was a new reality; it was as though gravity had lessened and everything had become easier, lighter.

Instead of waiting with Gollum at the bus stop for Morgan Devoe or Hailey Madison to peg them with empty soda cans, Dea and Gollum were riding to school in Connor's Tahoe. At lunch, she, Connor, and Gollum split french fries and debated whether mayonnaise was an acceptable condiment. (Gollum was a yes, Connor a firm no.)

They went to the homecoming pep rally together, all three of them, and sat together on the bleachers huddled under an enormous blanket that Gollum had found in the horse barn (it still
smelled like hay). They ignored the game, and instead pretended to be sociologists witnessing alien social groups and arcane mating rituals. By group consensus, they vetoed the dance and instead drove Connor's car to the middle of an abandoned farm, and had a midnight picnic in the field with corn chips and spiked hot chocolate Connor had brought in a thermos. On Halloween, they dressed up like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Gollum was the jelly and wore all purple. Dea was the peanut butter and wore all brown. And Connor didn't wear anything special, but kept squishing them into enormous bear hugs and shouting, “Sandwich!”

Connor either didn't notice that he'd made friends with the two biggest losers at Fielding, or he didn't care. He never teased Gollum about her clothing or the fact that she was on the subsidy program at lunch, although he teased her about everything else—shipping Harry and Hermione (“how obvious”), listening to Led Zeppelin, refusing to pee in public restrooms. And he never said anything about the rumors, which Dea was sure he must have heard: that Dea and her mom were cannibals. That Dea and her mom were zombies. That they sucked the blood out of local animals, and worshipped the devil. He never asked her why she had to sit out in gym, either, or why she sometimes lost her breath even if they hadn't been walking fast.

Connor made no secret about hating Fielding almost as much as Dea and Gollum did. When he passed his cousin, Will Briggs, in the halls, Dea noticed that they barely spoke to each other. Will sometimes muttered hi. Connor sometimes nodded. That was it.

She was happy. She didn't worry too much about it. She
didn't wonder why Will Briggs almost seemed afraid to meet Connor's eyes, as if Connor might hex him.

She didn't hear the rumors about Connor—whispered stories about what had happened to his mom and baby brother all those years ago; rumors that it was Connor's fault. That he'd done it and only made up that crazy cover story afterward, of the intruder he hadn't seen. That his dad had orchestrated a cover-up to keep Connor from getting shoved in a mental institution. That some woman was writing a book about it and was going to tell the truth.

She didn't hear any of it. How would she? Connor and Gollum were the only two people she talked to.

Once upon a time, there was a pregnant woman who dreamed of a woman, also with child. The woman who dreamed was very sick. The doctors said she was dying. She hadn't woken in two whole days, hadn't spoken or stirred.

But only dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed.

And as she lay in her hospital bed, sheathed in sheets as cold as a thick layer of ice, she dreamed of the other woman, belly taut and round as a bowl, lying in the middle of a field of snow. But the snow drifted like feathers, and warmed, too, and the dream woman was laughing, her mouth open to the sky, her pink tongue exposed.

And the real woman could feel the tickle of the snow, the drumming
of the dream-woman's heart, the stirring of the dream-child in the dream-world of snow as soft as kisses.

“I'll save you,” the dream-woman said, opening her eyes, and sliding a hand inside her coat, onto her swollen belly, where a tiny dream-heart drummed and drummed. “We'll save you. Just let us in.”

Then the snow became a river of plastic, sliding down her throat, and the snow broke apart into white walls, and the whole world became a scream.

Two screams.

Then the woman who was supposed to have died woke up, and found she had given birth to a beautiful child, with eyes the blue of new ice and skin the color of snow.

In the weeks since Dea and Connor had met, she had walked his dreams four times. She couldn't stop. She didn't want to. For the first time in her life, she could sympathize with addicts. She was filled with a near-constant ache, an itch that seemed to come from
inside
her, as if her blood were infected. She got relief only when she walked. The guilt—knowing that she was breaking the rules, that she was doing something wrong—made walking his dreams feel even more delicious.

Each time she entered his dreams, she found them softer, more pliable, more responsive to her. The overstructure was crumbling.

The second time she walked, she arrived in the middle of a crowded wharf in what looked like the 1920s, except that the deckhands were checking off lists of passengers by administering math homework. The third time, she ended up above an old racetrack that Connor and his dad were endlessly circling in separate cars, trying to get the advantage. In the distance, she spotted a single other spectator leaning against the chain-link fence that divided the car track from the fields beyond it, dark hair hanging to his jaw, hand up to his eyes to shield them from the sun so that his face was in shadow. He struck Dea as somehow familiar, but she was too far to make out what he looked like clearly.

The fourth time she walked, she found herself in a set of high bleachers bordering an indoor pool. The air stunk of chlorine, and people were cheering. Above them, a cracked-glass ceiling was webbed with condensation. Connor was swimming, his arms circling soundlessly, his body sleek as an animal's. Birds raced above the water, casting shadows on its surface, occasionally submerging to sweep up the flashing belly of a fish.

Dea had sat alone in the very back row of bleachers, cheering for Connor along with everybody else, knowing he wouldn't see her.

“Do you ever miss swimming?” she'd said to him the next day, at lunch.

He looked up, startled. “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “Yeah. I do.” Then he'd reached over impulsively, grabbed her hand, and squeezed, and Gollum smirked in a way that made Dea both embarrassed and deliriously happy.

All of the reasons she had never walked Gollum's dreams—it
was intrusive and weirdly intimate; she didn't want to do that to a friend; what if she saw something terrible?—she was quickly able to dismiss when it came to Connor. She knew she was invading his privacy, feeding on his innermost thoughts and using them, but no one cared about privacy anymore; everyone knew that. Connor was on Facebook, after all—that was almost just as bad. (Last year, Greg Blume had hacked Coralie Wikinson's profile and switched her profile picture out to a blurry camera shot of her . . . Dea didn't even like to think the word. Her mom still called it the “flower pot,” which for years she had heard as “flour pot,” a misunderstanding that had made the act of baking cookies very embarrassing.) And it wasn't like Dea would use the knowledge
against
him.

The fifth time she walked, she was back in Chicago.

There was the usual swinging feeling, the sensation of darkness and an imminent fall. But she was through it quickly; navigating the in-between space was getting easier, too. The darkness broke apart and she stepped through it. She was standing among mounds of broken-up cinder blocks and concrete ruins, the remains of the apartment complex that had once been Connor's mind's protection from her intrusion. There was a sign staked to a chain-link fence nearby:
COMING SOON, WHOLE FOODS
. Dea almost laughed. It was a nice touch.

It was snowing again—the same ashy gray snow, accumulating in thick, silent piles, far faster than normal snow. The Christmas lights were still blinking on the awning of the deli across the street. Light overspilling its big window turned the snow a sickly shade of green. She scanned the windows above her, noting the bedroom she'd identified as Connor's, which was fitted with funny
blue curtains patterned with giraffes. She saw a shadow pass the window and wondered if it was Connor or his mom. She imagined the big Christmas tree behind them, covered in tiny glass ornaments, like a coating of frost. She wished, for a moment, she could go upstairs, knock on the door, invite herself in.

But she knew that Connor must never see her in his dream. Miriam had always emphasized that rule especially. Dea wasn't even sure what would happen if he did. Maybe he'd die from shock or something. Then she'd be stuck here, in his dream, forever. Or maybe she'd die with him.

Instead she crossed the street and repeated her trick with the Christmas lights, tearing them down with one hard yank. Her hands were shaking a little, and her mouth was dry. Funny how even her dream-self got anxious.

She knelt in the snow, enjoying the slice of the cold in and out of her lungs, her breath steaming in the air. She worked quickly, her fingers red, stiff from the cold.

She was nearly done before she realized something was wrong. It shouldn't be so cold. Connor never filled in the details like that. And it was only getting colder. Now each breath felt like inhaling glass. The snow fell so thickly, she could hardly see. The construction site across the street was almost completely obscured by a thick veil of gray snow, like a vast shadow stretching from the sky to the earth.

The dream shifted almost imperceptibly, like the ground right before an earthquake. But suddenly she was aware of the vast silence of the streets and the darkness of the skies and a waiting quiet, as of an animal holding its breath to avoid attack, and she knew that this wasn't a dream anymore.

It was a nightmare.

She felt them even before she turned around.

There were two of them coming down the street—men, she thought at first, but as they drew closer, she saw she was wrong. The urge to scream worked its way from her chest to her throat and froze there.

They had no faces. No eyes, no noses, no cheekbones or foreheads: just a swirl of flesh-colored skin, barely patched together, like some horrible painting left to bleed in the rain. But they did have mouths. Dark mouths, gaping open, toothless, like long dark tunnels. They were sucking the air in-out, in-out through their mouths. Tasting it.

Looking for someone.

She felt as if the wires that kept her body and mind connected had been cut. She stumbled toward the door of the deli, slipping in the snow, barely managing to right herself. She threw herself inside—a bell tinkled overhead and she was furious, in that moment, that this, of all details, was intact, the stupid, fucking bell—and slammed the door, wishing it had a lock. The deli was empty, thank God. The cash register was barely sketched in. It kept blinking in and out, like the awning lights, now half-buried in the snow.

The lights. They would see the lights and know she had interfered.

They would find her.

She remembered what her mother had said all those years earlier: she must follow the rules or the monsters would find her.

Dea's heart was going so fast it was like the rush of water. She thought she might pass out. She didn't know whether that was
possible—to pass out or die in someone else's dream. Maybe, if her own heart just stopped. She'd have to ask Mom.

Why hadn't she listened to Mom?

On the street just outside the deli, the men with no faces stopped. Even through the glass, Dea could hear the sucking drag of their breath.
In-out
. She dropped into a crouch, partially concealed behind a display of Miller Lite. Now she was hot—sweating, nauseous, feeling like she might be sick.
Please
, she thought.
Please. Go away. Keep moving. Please.

She felt as if she'd been crouching there for an infinity. Her thighs were cramping. She wanted out. She wanted to be back in her bed, safe, with the rhythm of her mom's clocks ticking reassuringly in the darkened hall.
In-out
. Her chest ached from holding her breath. She was afraid they would hear her, though they had no ears, either—just bits of melted flesh where ears should have been.

Then they were gone. They continued past the deli, and she was so relieved that for a moment she didn't register that they had gone into Connor's building—that they must have. She straightened up. Her legs were shaking. Hands, too. The snow outside had turned black; she would have mistaken it for rain, if it hadn't been falling soundlessly. She could barely make out the silhouette of a blackened church across the street—the construction site was gone.

The dream was changing on her. Her body was tight with terror.

She had to get out before the men—the
monsters
—came back.

The deli was mostly empty of food. Even as she watched,
she saw bits of the room begin to evaporate and blur, as though someone was taking an eraser to them, and she knew Connor's attention was now fixed elsewhere. Electric fixtures in the ceiling became smudgy coronas of light; cereal boxes vanished off the shelves, dissipating like liquid in the heat; the shelves themselves began to melt. She grabbed a roll of paper towels before it could disappear and shredded open the plastic with her teeth.

She imagined she could still hear the men breathing behind her—
in-out
—and feel the pressure of hot breath on her neck.

She tore off a square of paper towel, but her hands were shaking too badly and her first bird came out lopsided. It barely lifted off the ground before fluttering shakily directly into the wall and collapsing, inert, only half-changed: a small pale beak and one feather were visible within the folds of paper.

She tried again. This time she managed it: it was an ugly bird, rudimentary, but it should work.

Birds are harbingers
. She remembered sitting at the kitchen table when she was six or seven, in front of vast piles of paper birds. Her mom was making cranes, crows, swans—her fingers moving quickly, practically a blur, until the whole table was covered with them. Was that in Delaware? St. Louis? She remembered a river sparkling in the distance; she was never allowed to go near it.

Dea launched the bird into the air. For a second, it fluttered unsteadily, just a scrap of paper towel in the stale air of an old deli.

Then it changed. Its wings stiffened and sprouted white feathers. Its tail unfolded.

Dea pushed open the door as the dove swooped out into the
street. She plunged into the cold. The snow felt like tiny bites on her skin. There was no light left in the street—no light from anywhere in the world, except for the small window high above them. Connor's house.

Dimly, she heard screaming. But it was worse than screaming. Explosions so loud they made colors pop behind her eyes.
Boom
. She ran, stumbling, following the dove as it wove through the air, wings speckled with black snow.
Boom
. She didn't turn around, didn't look back, didn't realize she was crying.
Boom
. She left Connor behind, left the screaming behind, left the Christmas lights still blinking, earthbound, beaming up a message to the sky:
Kiss me
.

Boom.

She sat up, breathing hard, fighting back a scream. Her room was cold but she was sweating. She groped for the light on her bedroom table, and could have sobbed with relief when suddenly her room was revealed—all hard angles and planes, nubby carpet and water-stained desk, faded curtains—real, real, real.

Boom.
She jumped. But it was only her mom, pounding on her door. The sound must have reached her even in Connor's dream.

“Dea? Dea? Are you awake?”

She was so shaken from the nightmare, and the vision of men with no faces, that she forgot that she and her mom weren't speaking. She shoved Connor's swim medal under her pillow, as though Miriam would see it and know what Dea had done. She swept her hair back into a ponytail and checked the clock on her bedside table. Six thirty a.m. She wondered, briefly, whether
Connor was still in the middle of that nightmare.

Where had those horrible monsters come from?

“Unlock the door, Dea. I need to talk to you.”

Her legs felt sore, as if she'd actually run a long distance in the snow. As soon as she unlocked the door, she crawled back into bed.

It had been a while—at least a month—since Miriam had been in Dea's room. She entered cautiously, as if afraid that the piles of clothing on the floor might conceal a deadly snake, and stopped a few feet from Dea's bed.

“What is it?” Dea pulled her covers to her chin.

“Are you all right?” Miriam said. She looked pale and pinched and worried, as if the past few weeks had worked on her like a gravitational force, sucking out her center. “I heard you cry out.”

“I'm fine,” Dea said.

“Were you walking?”

“No,” Dea lied. And then realized it was a stupid thing to say. She and her mother didn't dream. Why else would she have cried out? “Yeah,” she said. “Something stupid. There were bugs. Why'd you wake me?”

“I need to go take care of a few things,” Miriam said, turning to the window. She parted the curtains with two fingers and peered out into the darkness, and Dea had a sudden moment of terror: the men would be there, breathing their ragged breaths onto the glass. But of course, there was no one. Just the reflection of Dea's room in the darkened windowpanes.

“At six thirty in the morning?”

Miriam let the curtains drop, but didn't turn around. “Start packing your things. It's time.”

Dea took a deep breath. Her lungs ached, as if the cold from Connor's dream had infected her. “You aren't serious.”

“There's no point in getting angry. It won't change anything.” Miriam picked her way through the clothes back to the door. She didn't even look sorry, or embarrassed, or anything but faintly impatient, as if the conversation were keeping her from more important things.

Dea closed her eyes and reopened them. How many other mornings had her mom woken her up saying the very same thing?
I have some things to take care of. Start packing. It's time.