Dreamland (8 page)

For a minute, he didn't say anything. The ride stalled suddenly; they sat swinging over empty air.

He rubbed his forehead, like it hurt. “I don't want you to go either,” he said. Just like that, the curtain between them had opened again. She felt a surge of relief so strong it was like joy. She put a hand on his arm.

“About what I said—what I asked—I'm so sorry—I never believed—”

“I was seven,” he said abruptly, cutting her off. As they
plummeted again, his face was swallowed in darkness. “My dad was away. He was away a lot back then. Business. It was just me and my mom and my brother for Christmas.” His words came haltingly, as if this wasn't a story he had told very often. But he must have—in court, in therapy, maybe even on the news. “Jacob was only one year old. He'd been the worst baby. He had colic. Do you know what that is?” He didn't wait for her to shake her head. “He cried all the time. All the time. It drove my dad berserk. Mom, too. But then at six months he just . . . stopped crying. It was like he was all cried out. Then he was always smiling.”

She held her breath, afraid she might say or do the wrong thing again.

“It was Christmas Eve.” His voice had gotten so quiet she had to lean in to hear him. Now their shoulders were touching, too. “I went to bed early. I was so excited. You know how kids are about Christmas.” His hands were balled into fists in his lap. “It was the shot that woke me. The first shot didn't kill her. It wasn't meant to kill her.”

Dea shivered.

“There were men—I heard voices. Everything was so confusing. I heard my mom say
please
and
no
. I was so scared I couldn't move. Couldn't even hide. I was so scared I peed. I hadn't peed the bed since I was two.” He glanced at her just for a second, as if to verify she wasn't going to make fun of him. “Then I heard . . . a crack. We found out later that it was her skull. He took the lamp from the bedside table and just hammered her head in. Jacob was still screaming.” He closed his eyes. “I could have saved him.”

Dea found her hand in his lap. Connor squeezed it, hard.
“You could have died,” she said.

He opened his eyes again. He interlaced his fingers with hers, and stared down at their hands. “They shot Jake in the middle of the forehead. Execution-style.” His voice hitched. “Do you know how small a one-year-old baby is? So small. With hands like little flowers.” He looked away and she saw his jaw working back and forth. She knew he was trying not to cry. “The cops said afterward that Jacob wasn't really a target. They probably shot him just to shut him up, you know? So they'd have time to escape.”

Dea thought of the two faceless men she'd seen in Connor's nightmare.

“I'm so sorry, Connor.” The words sounded stupid, even to her—insubstantial, narrow.
Sorry
was what you said when you accidentally bumped into someone in the supermarket, or forgot to do your homework. Where were the words for tragedies like this one?

“Thanks.” He coughed. They were on their last rotation now, coasting slowly through the air, stopping again every few seconds as passengers disembarked. The carnival felt like it was a million miles away. Silence expanded between them. She thought he was done talking, but then he said, “I saw them. Just before they left, I saw them. I crawled to the door. They had to go past my room to get to the front door, you know. I was practically shitting myself, I was so scared. But I cracked open my door, just an inch, so I would see them as they passed.”

“But the cops never caught them?” Dea asked.

He shook his head. “I—I couldn't see their faces.” His voice was strangled, as if the words were choking him.

The ride was over. They touched ground, and two teenage kids with faces full of pimples stepped forward to disengage the safety bar. Dea was unsteady when she stood. She was suddenly disoriented by the whirring of arcade games and the smells of popcorn and hot dogs, the rapid-fire shouts, like jungle calls.

Connor didn't let go of her hand. Something had changed between them, but she didn't know whether it was a good or bad thing.

It started to rain just as they got back to his car. He put on the heat and she sat with the hot blast of air stirring the hair from her neck, tickling her throat, wishing there was something more she could say or do. She was tired, and frightened; she didn't want to go home. Now she knew they couldn't move—she couldn't leave Connor. Somehow, he had become hers to care about and worry about and protect.

Halfway back to Fielding, the rain got so bad it sliced the headlights into thousands of fragments, pummeled the roof and windows, and turned the windshield into a solid sheet of water. The wind knocked the car back and forth across the road, and she could feel the wheels hydroplaning on the road. That's how storms came in Indiana: quickly, without any warning.

It was too dangerous to keep driving. They could barely see the semis on the road until the trucks were on top of them, whooshing past them in a gush of wind, leaning on their horns. Connor found a McDonald's off the highway and parked the car in a dark spot between streetlamps. Before Dea could stop him, he'd pushed out into the rain. He sprinted toward the entrance, arms up over his head, water kicking beneath his shoes. When he returned, he was carrying his jacket like a baby in his arms.
As soon as he opened the door, Dea smelled fat and meat and delicious fried things, a smell that always reminded her of childhood. She hadn't realized how long it had been since they'd eaten. She was starving.

“For you, madam.” He unfolded his jacket and revealed a paper bag nestled inside of it, just barely spotted with water. But his T-shirt was soaked. The fabric was plastered to his skin, so she could see the lines of his shoulder blades and muscles. He'd bought her a double cheeseburger—he'd remembered they were her favorite—and a Coke. They split the french fries, their hands bumping every so often when they both reached into the bag. Connor's shirt was damp, and the smell of laundry detergent and clean cotton intermingled with the lingering fast food smells. It was comforting. Like being in a fort while the rest of the world melted.

“Thanks for listening tonight,” he said. “I'm sorry about how I . . . well, I'm just sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too.” She'd just finished the last of the fries. She was full and sleepy and happy. “I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“I'm glad you did.” Connor looked down at his lap. “It felt kind of good to talk about it. I've thought about telling you before. At the same time . . . I don't know. I liked that you didn't know.” He turned to her. “It's been my whole life. I've carried it with me everywhere. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said. That was the problem, she thought: no matter where she and her mom went, no matter how far they ran, they carried their old selves with them, their broken-down bodies and jerky hearts, the need to walk, the dreams that clung to them like shadows.

“Hey, Dea?” Connor was smiling, just barely.

“Yeah?”

He leaned closer. He found her hand. “I like you, too.”

A shooting pain went through her—what would happen if her mom insisted she leave? What could she do? Where would she live?—but she pushed the thoughts away.

“Check it out.” Connor leaned over her, so for a moment his chest was an inch from her mouth and she thought about kissing the spot between his collar bones. Then the seat whirred backward, bringing her with it, so she was staring up at the roof. He put his seat back, too, so they were lying side by side, separated only by the console. The rain was a constant thrum, like the beating of a gigantic heart.

They lay there for a long time, fingers interlinked on the console, with the heat blowing and the world pouring down around them. At a certain point, Dea realized that Connor had fallen asleep. She wanted to wake him but by then she, too, was teetering, somewhere on the balance between wakefulness and sleep. She let go, instead, and let the darkness close over her.

She was in without trying, relieved to find herself not in Chicago but in some other patchwork landscape—a combination, she realized, of Indiana flatlands and an industrial yard, grass running into pavement, and warehouses turning the horizon smudgy with smoke. Connor was standing with a half dozen other boys in the center of a field, playing a version of Red Rover, except their hands were chained together and they were all wearing prison jumpsuits, vivid orange against the dull gray sky.

But even as she stood there, trying to convince herself to leave, to let Connor be, the concrete began eating up the grass, spreading like an inky stain from one end of the field to the other, and
the boys froze and darkened and elongated, becoming telephone poles and streetlamps. The warehouses splintered and stretched, punching up to the sky like enormous fists. Snow began to fall, and wind whipped down the now-familiar Chicago street.

The dream was sharper than it had ever been, every detail realized, every angle precise and well-constructed. The deli with the blinking Christmas lights and the Lotto sign was fully stocked now, although there was no one behind the register. In the distance, someone was singing “Silent Night.”

Connor was remembering better, more clearly. His conversation with Dea had brought back the details. She knew, too, that she was experiencing the dream so vividly because they were lying so close. There was no veil between them, no psychic interference.

A car rolled slowly down the middle of the street, beaming thick cones of light out into the whirl of snow. Already, she could feel it—a prickling unease, like being watched from a distance. And she knew the dream was changing imperceptibly, growing colder and darker. The men with no faces were coming. Above her, Connor's apartment was dark.

She went around to the back of the building. A chain-link fence separated the alley from an area for parking and garbage disposal. She hopped it easily, her feet crunching in the snow when she landed. She'd never been in a dream this real. It made her even more alert, and even more afraid.

Could you die in a dream? Really die?

She had never asked.

Stitched up the back of Connor's building was a set of wooden stairs, similar to the one that had run up and down the
back of the apartment she and her mom had rented in Chicago. She began to climb. The snow muffled the sound of her footsteps. The railing was icy, so she kept her hands in her pockets.

On the fourth floor, Connor's floor, it was dark. The light was missing its bulb. A trash bag had been dumped just outside the door, its slick black surface already pooling with snow. She eased open the screen door and tried the handle. Locked. She would need a key.

She had never messed too much with the fluid nature of dreams, except to make harbingers when she needed to find an exit. That was the whole point of walking—noninterference. But she knew that dreams flowed. They reacted to minor shifts like water breaking around a rock. That was part of why it was important not to change anything, her mom always told her.

Picture a rock dropped into a well,
she'd said.
Picture all those ripples spreading outward. If the rock is big enough, you can start a flood.

Dea squatted and sketched the rough outline of a key in the snow with a finger. She was terrible at drawing—it looked more like a knife. Anyway, nothing happened.

She spotted a wire hanger distending one portion of the trash bag. She tore a small hole in the bag, working with her fingers to enlarge it. It was so quiet and still, she could practically hear the snow fall. Every sound she made was thunderous, as if it were echoing across the whole city, across the whole dream. She worked the wire hanger out of the bag, releasing a small cascade of trash in the snow: an empty hair dye carton, the shattered globe of a discarded Christmas ornament, a wadded-up paper towel.

She straightened out a portion of the hanger and worked it into the lock. At last, the dream responded. There was an invisible ripple, a change, like passing from air into water, and suddenly she was holding not a hanger, but a key. It turned easily in the lock. She hesitated for only a second before she eased the door open, and stepped into the darkness of Connor's old apartment.

Her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum floor, and she stood still, holding her breath, listening for sounds of movement. Nothing. A dim light up ahead illuminated the rough shape of a kitchen: countertops and cabinets. Dea marveled at the details. There was a plate, several cookies, and a glass of milk on the kitchen table—Dea realized they must be for Santa Claus and felt her heart constrict. It was amazing what the mind could recall and re-create—even things the dreamer could never remember when awake. It was like dreaming was a secret doorway into places forgotten or deliberately buried. On her left was a large living room and the source of the light: a decorated Christmas tree. The small lights glimmered in the branches, casting strange patterns on the ceilings and wall. To her right were several doors, two of them closed, one of them open just a crack. She inched slowly toward the open door, holding her breath, terrified that at any second Connor might appear—or, even worse, she'd hear the wet mouth-breathing of the faceless men somewhere in the darkness behind her. But nothing happened. She spotted the corner of a desk and a twin bed draped with dark green sheets. Connor's room, then.

She knew that what she was doing was wrong. She was taking a huge chance. Never be seen. That was the most important rule of dream-walking. But it was as if the dream was a heartbeat,
pulsing through her, drawing her forward. She moved quickly down the hall, deeper into the house, deeper into the dream.

The next door led to a bathroom. That left one closed door, and one final bedroom. Connor's mom's room. Where his baby brother had slept. Where the murders had happened. She placed a hand on the doorknob, then hesitated. Maybe it was better not to know. What if she entered and saw Connor's mom's face already splattered across the pillow, his poor baby brother lying in a pool of blood?

What if she entered and saw Connor, standing over his brother's crib with a gun?

What if he had lied after all?

She dismissed that thought quickly. She didn't—she wouldn't—believe it. And still the dream seemed to draw her forward and deeper, as if she were a ship riding a strong current. She eased open the door, cold with terror.

Then she was inside the room and the fear was gone, making her feel loose and shaky. Connor's mom was sleeping on her back, lips partly open, snoring quietly. Connor's brother was curled like a small fern in a patch of moonlight in a crib near the foot of the bed. They hadn't died, not tonight, not in this dream. She knew it didn't change anything in real life, but it seemed like a miracle: in some place, in some version of reality, imagined or wished, they were alive.

She should go. She knew she should go—slip out of the dream, unobserved, no harm done. But she was moved by the sudden impulse to know what Connor's mom looked like, whether Connor and his mom shared the same chin, whether he was written, somehow, in her face. She inched forward, toward the bed.

Connor's mom's chest swelled and fell under the sheets. Her dark hair was scattered across the pillow. She was smiling very slightly in her sleep—a dream within a dream.

“What the hell?”

Dea spun around. Connor was standing in the doorway, rigid, staring—seventeen-year-old Connor, his normal self, not the six-year-old he had been when his mom had died. This was dream-logic, the push-pull between reality and projection, memory and wish.

She felt a wild seesaw of panic.

Never be seen.

“What—what are you doing here?” He took a step forward. His mom stirred.

“It's a dream,” she whispered.
You must never, ever be seen
. This was wrong, all wrong. She felt the dream stretching, bending around her, as if it might come down.

“No.” Connor came closer. But she found no comfort in his presence. His eyes were hard, horrified. “You're
here
.” He grabbed her arms, gripping her so tightly it hurt. “Why are you here?”

“Let me go.” she said. Connor's mother moaned. His brother still slept quietly in his crib, his face obscured by a long stripe of shadow. Then Dea realized it wasn't shadow. It was blood—blood seeping from his head, pouring onto the ground, sliding across the room toward them like inky dark fingers. Connor's mom was bleeding, too. Her eyes were open and she was staring sightlessly at the ceiling, moaning over and over. Her head was split in two.

Dea was suddenly so terrified, she wanted to cry. “Please let me go.”

“You shouldn't have come here, Dea.” Connor sounded regretful. His face was changing, too—melting, almost, his features distorted like candle wax by heat. “Now they know where to find you.”

Dea froze. “Who?” she whispered, even though she knew—she sensed it in the air, in the frigid room, in the blood pooling around her shoes.

Connor's eyes had turned black. He opened his mouth, but instead of answering, his mouth expanded, yawning open like a tunnel, and the rest of his face simply blew apart. Dea stumbled backward. He was no longer Connor but one of those things—faceless, deformed, his breathing wet and ragged.

“We've been looking for you,” the thing said, and its voice was like the howl of wind through a canyon.

Then everything exploded. The room, the walls, the floor—there was a tremendous blast and Dea was falling, screaming, as the building around her turned to black dust and then evaporated. The nightmare was eating everything, turning it to rot. The monsters had consumed Connor. They would consume her, too.

She hit the snow hard and slipped. She rolled back onto her feet and began to run, crying, ignoring the pain in her ankle and wrist where she had fallen on them wrong. The snow was so heavy it was hard to move, but she plunged recklessly forward, not daring to look back. The thing was right behind her. She could hear it panting, and feel the wet blast of its death-sweet breath on her neck.

Around her, the dream was coming down. Whole buildings collapsed in an instant, thundering to the street. Scaffolding
crashed through windshields; metal ricocheted into storefront windows and the air vibrated with the sound of wailing alarms.

Connor was trying to wake up.

She needed to find a way out.

The
thing
was closer now. She felt its long, wet fingers graze her back, like the touch of someone's tongue, and she screamed. A string of stoplights came down—crash, crash, crash—sparking in the snow. She dodged a fallen streetlamp, her heart screaming in her throat, her legs burning, tears freezing on her cheeks.

From somewhere far away she thought she heard her mom calling her name.
Mommy
, she wanted to scream.
Help me
. But she couldn't scream at all. She could hardly breathe. Her lungs felt like they'd been flattened, and she could barely draw in enough air to keep running.

An exit. She needed an exit. But every doorway crumbled before she could reach it. The whole city was turning into cascades of dust and dark sand. She had no time to make a harbinger. She veered toward the sidewalk, and toward a small dark archway between buildings that looked as if it might be a way out. But she tripped on the curb, half-concealed by the snow, and went skidding, facedown, on the icy sidewalk. She tasted blood in her mouth. Already the archway was crumbling, bricks thudding to the ground, as if the whole street were being rocked by a massive earthquake.

Then the thing had its hand around her ankle. She lashed out and landed a kick in its chest. It stumbled backward and she pushed herself back to her feet. When she risked a glance behind her, she saw the
thing
was no longer alone. There was a second one now, with a face like a hole and long, black fingers; it had materialized out of nowhere.

Help me, help me, help me
, she screamed silently. The air was thick with dust and plaster and her ears were ringing. The city was being torn apart: it screamed like a living thing; it groaned and cried out.

She turned the corner and found herself in a narrow street flanked by warehouses and blocked, at one end, by a massive pile of rubble. A dead end. She turned around to backtrack, but the monsters burst around the corner. The buildings on either side of her began to shiver and shake.

Even though the men had no faces, Dea could tell they were smiling.

She swiveled around again, desperate, her breath slicing through her chest. Her mom's voice was still singing in her head. And then, just as the buildings around her started to crumble, tumbling soft piles of old brick and sheetrock into the street, sending plumes of snow shooting back toward the sky, as the men reached out their liquid fingers to her and unhinged their jaws, roaring, as if to swallow her whole—as she felt their wet breath on her throat and neck, their eager, tasting tongues, black as rot—a narrow opening was revealed, just for a second, as one of the warehouses shifted on its foundation. She threw herself sideways toward the thin slice of darkness, and heard a scream as if the whole world was tearing.

She woke up, gasping. Connor woke up at the same time. His face was damp with sweat. The rain was much lighter now, and the car was far too hot.

“You,” was the first thing he said. Then: “What the hell? What the hell was that?”

She couldn't speak. She knew if she tried to talk, she would start to cry. Her ankle and wrist still ached, a phantom pain
carried over from the dream world. She wanted her mom. She wanted her mom to run her fingers through the wild tangle of her hair and tell her it would be okay.

“You were there.” His eyes were wild and wide, just like they had been in the dream. She was suddenly frightened of him. “I wasn't just dreaming you.
You were there
.” He grabbed her arms, as he had done in his dream bedroom, before the blood started pooling, before the monsters came. Fear made her stomach feel loose; she had to get out of the car, away from Connor, away from what had happened.