Nightmare’s Edge (13 page)
“That was remarkable!” Dr. Gordon called. “I’m learning something new with every experiment.”
Solomon turned his way. “What happened?”
“Francesca generated her own sphere. Her thoughts penetrated the dream world, and the Earth Yellow telescope picked it up.” Dr. Gordon tapped away at his keyboard. “I am adjusting the fields to plunge deeper into the dreamscape.”
“And what of the other Earths?” Solomon asked.
“Francesca’s energy surge allowed me to refine the calibrations. I’m pretty sure we can bring the other two in clearly.
I’ll let the computer generate the music for each world, but I’ll keep the volume down. With three different tunes playing simultaneously, it wouldn’t be pleasing to our ears.”
Nathan looked up again. His mother’s wedding scene had darkened, while two other slices transformed into the usual chaotic colors. At the center, however, where the three wedges met, a circular portion stayed dark, taking up about a tenth of the entire screen. With a black hole in the middle, the curved viewing area now looked more like a doughnut than a pie.
After several seconds, all three wedges began to clarify. At the upper right, the section his mother had filled earlier with her daytime dream, a snow scene took shape — the same city block where they had picked up Molly and later found Tony.
With deepening drifts covering parked cars and sidewalks, no pedestrians braved the cascading sea of falling flakes.
Nathan cocked his head and whispered to his mother. “Since someone’s dreaming this, that’s not the real weather. The snow stopped quite a while ago.”
“But who is the dreamer?” she asked.
“Good question.” Nathan tilted his head back. Watching the huge screen directly overhead made his neck ache and dizzied his brain.
In the upper-left section, another picture took shape, dotted with static, like a TV broadcast from far away. Weather-beaten tombstones rose at crooked angles from a weed-infested lawn. Storm clouds boiled in the sky. Jagged bolts of green lightning crashed to the ground, raising sparks and igniting fires that sent purple smoke and yellow embers into the swirling breeze. Again, no one was in sight.
“Another cemetery?” Nathan glanced at his mother to his right, then at Daryl to his left. “Why is it always a cemetery?”
Daryl shivered. “Reminds me of
The Omen
. If I see triple sixes on the screen, I’m out of here.”
Finally, on the lower third, at least from Nathan’s awkward angle, an even fuzzier scene came into view — the New York City skyline on a clear, sunny day. Standing tall in the midst of their lesser neighbors, the two World Trade Center towers reflected the morning sun. Nathan eyed the buildings. Why would they still be there? They collapsed years ago.
The scene switched to an airplane cockpit. The pilot, sweating profusely, spoke into a microphone attached to his headphones, but no sound came out. A man of Middle Eastern descent stooped at the pilot’s side and pushed a blade against his throat.
“That’s my daddy!” Daryl cried. “The pilot’s my daddy!”
Tony put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s just a dream.”
“Oh, yeah.” She sniffed and wiped her fist under her nose. “Now I remember. He’s talked about this dream. He’s the pilot of a jet that crashes into one of the towers. He says he always hopes he can stop the tragedy, but — ”
The hijacker jerked the pilot from the seat, leaving a trail of blood. With the limp body at his side, he took the controls. Through the windshield, the tower drew closer and closer at tremendous speed. Then flames blasted across the screen. Glass, furniture, body parts, and streams of fire flew everywhere.
Daryl covered her eyes. “I can’t look! I can’t look!”
Nathan cringed but kept watching. What would happen next? Surely this was the end of the dream. Would everything get sucked into a void as it had done at the playground?
A crack formed at the top of the section, tearing open the boundary between the dream and the ceiling’s central black circle, the doughnut hole Nathan had labeled in his mind. Darkness blew into the fiery carnage, swirling as it slurped everything in sight. Within seconds, the scene vanished, and only a sea of blackness appeared in the section.
Nathan looked at the computer desks. Dr. Gordon and the two Simons alternately watched the ceiling and their monitors.
“Can someone give me an explanation?” Nathan called. “What’s going on up there?”
“Yeah,” Daryl said. “This is like
The Twilight Zone
meets
The
X-Files
meets
Night of the Living Dead
.”
Simon Yellow pointed at the snow scene. “That’s the dream world here. Someone has likely fallen asleep recently and is remembering the snowstorm, but he or she has exaggerated its ferocity.” He shifted his finger to the cemetery. “That is the Earth Blue dream world. It seems clear that a dreamer has imagined quite a terrible graveyard nightmare. Perhaps soon we will see that person appear.” He walked closer to the center of the room and nodded toward the final section. “That was a dream in Earth Red. Apparently our telescope found Daryl’s father and showed us his dream.”
He looked at Daryl, half closing one eye. “From what you said, I gathered that this disaster is one in your history, but no one has told me about it yet.”
“Nine-eleven,” Nathan said. “Terrorists flew airliners into the World Trade Center towers on September eleventh, two thousand and one.”
Daryl smacked her palms together. “Knocked ’em both flat. My dad’s been obsessed with it ever since. He never made it as a pilot for the big airliners, and he dreams about what he would’ve done if he’d been there.”
Simon Yellow looked at Simon Blue but said nothing, though his brow was bent, making his owl-like glasses slip down his nose. Nathan eased back a step. The tension was thick. Since the two Simons had been working together to prevent Earth Yellow disasters, apparently Simon of the Blue world had been giving his Yellow counterpart a history lesson, a morbid laundry list of the calamities that were going to befall the people of Earth Yellow. Apparently, Simon Blue hadn’t mentioned “nine-eleven,” but that was still several years away, and with all the differences now between the worlds, the terrorists’ plot might not come about at all.
He stepped closer to the computer screen and eyed the unintelligible digits filling several windows. “So how did we happen to dial in Daryl’s father?”
“We’re picking up the strongest signals,” Dr. Gordon said. “My counterpart on Earth Red told me that Daryl’s father is waiting for her at the observatory in that world. Perhaps he has been there a long time and has fallen asleep under the mirror. It could have magnified his dream signal.”
Nathan nodded. The same thing had happened to Daryl Blue. She dreamed in the Earth Blue observatory, and he and Kelly had walked through her nightmare until Cerulean rescued her from it. “Are there any more clues to where Kelly’s signal is coming from?”
“It is somewhat stronger,” Dr. Gordon said, “but we still have no way to determine its source. There just isn’t anything else comparable.”
Simon Blue raised a finger. “Shall we show the new arrivals the hologram imaging?”
Dr. Gordon studied his screen for a moment. “Since we have good data in all three realms, I don’t see why not.”
“If this works,” Solomon said, “we can begin our search for Solomon Red immediately. We already have my energy signature in the computer, so we just have to find an exact copy somewhere in the dream worlds. He may well provide the final pieces to the interfinity puzzle.”
Using his touchpad, Dr. Gordon adjusted a slider on his screen. “As of this morning, we were able to display the real world images in the hologram, but the new mirror should give us an unfragmented representation of the dream worlds.”
At the center of the room, something clicked underneath the telescope, and a humming sound emanated from the floor. The telescope descended on a circular platform, and a metal plate slid from the adjoining floor panel to cover the hole.
Above, dozens of beams of light shot out from all around. Nathan searched for the source, but the lasers, or whatever they were, stayed hidden behind a narrow shelf that encircled the observatory where the base of the dome met the walls.
The beams converged just above where the telescope had stood. Fog swirled in the midst of a wide cylinder of multicolored light, rising from near the floor to about twelve feet in the air.
“Synchronizing the beams,” Dr. Gordon announced in a mechanical voice. “Visual clarification commencing.”
The fog evaporated, leaving behind recognizable shapes within the cylinder, the same trio of scenes that had been displayed on the ceiling, but now upright and in 3-D.
Sliding closer, Nathan gawked at the hologram. In the section nearest him, a knee-high tombstone stood near the edge of the cylinder, though the surrounding light made it look like a ghost, too vaporous to be seen clearly.
“Reducing background radiant energy,” Dr. Gordon said, his voice now shaking with emotion. “In a few seconds we’ll see the results of all our efforts.”
The laser beams diminished somewhat but stayed visible. The cylinder of light, however, faded away, leaving only the holographic images within. Now the tombstone became clear. Staying outside the original cylinder’s perimeter, Nathan stooped near the marker and read the engraving.
Here lies Felicity, an ugly blind girl.
Born — No one knows
Died — No one cares
Doomed to rot in this dark hole for all eternity.
Another hard lump grew in his throat. This had to be Felicity’s dream. Whoever she was, she must be able to generate powerful signals. But where was she now? Might she appear in this dream and bring Kelly along?
A shadow rushed away from the tombstone, then darted back. Nathan squinted but was unable to see into the dimness well enough to sort out the competing shades of darkness. The shy ghost would stay hidden, at least for now.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Gordon said as he rose and walked toward the hologram, “welcome to a dream come true.”
Solomon joined Nathan near the grave marker and whispered, “Almost literally a dream come true, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.” Nathan shivered. The cadence and quality of Solomon’s voice matched his father’s exactly. “I think the graveyard is Felicity’s dream, and Kelly went to wherever she went. Should I tell Dr. Gordon, or just play it cool and check it out on my own?”
“Let’s keep it to ourselves for now,” Solomon said. “I think he will tell us what to do in just a minute.”
While the others gathered around, Nathan drank in the details. Several other tombstones had appeared, each with etchings too small to be read. He strained his eyes. Could he get closer? Was it safe to lean in or even walk in?
Dr. Gordon walked over and pushed his hand into the hologram field. Like electrified ripples on a pond, the boundary shimmered with warped light waves, but it seemed to offer no resistance. “As you can see,” he said, “I can interrupt the flow without disturbing the image. You can literally walk through this dream without harming it or yourself.”
Nathan pushed a hand through. Although a slight tingling sensation crawled along his skin at the entry point, it didn’t hurt at all. “All right if I go in and look around?”
“I was hoping someone would.” Dr. Gordon withdrew a pair of eyeglasses from his shirt pocket. “These lenses are similar to the one inside your father’s camera. You see, we had already conducted experiments that helped us look at the dream hologram, but because of the danger in trying to get an Earth Blue mirror and because the Earth Yellow mirror was inaccessible until now, we had to use fragments from the shattered Earth Red mirror that Simon Blue recovered from the funeral site.
“The images we created were just as fragmented as the glass, and without the calibration we just gained from your travel to the dream world, much of our data was suspect. Yet, we did learn that dream images are skewed in both space and time. Because of these distortions, we were rarely able to figure out what was happening. Dreams might move at ten times normal speed or appear warped. We were unable to sort them out.”
Nathan nodded toward the graveyard. “Yeah. I noticed something moving in there. It was too quick to see.”
“That’s why you need these.” Dr. Gordon slid the glasses over Nathan’s eyes. “Now when you walk inside the hologram you will see a much clearer picture, as if you were actually within the dream world.”
Nathan took off the glasses and looked at one of the earpieces. “I felt something cold.”
Dr. Gordon touched a tiny metallic plate showing through the plastic. “You’re feeling two amplification devices, one for each ear. Although the mirror transmits sound, the signal is too weak for our instruments to detect outside the hologram. These will amplify the signal, allowing you to listen to the dream, just as if you were actually there.”
“But without the danger,” Solomon added. “You will be invisible to anyone in the dream world.”
Nathan put the glasses back on and rubbed an earpiece. “What does Kelly’s signal sound like?”
“That device picks up dream sounds,” Dr. Gordon said. “Her candle’s signal can be detected only by the radio telescopes. We will continue to monitor it and let you know if we can pinpoint its source.”
Nathan let out a sigh. “Okay. What should I do? Just walk around in there?”
“Yes. Go from one Earth to the other and study every feature. When you come out, you can report your findings. In the meantime, we will search for your father’s signature.”
“Will do.” Nathan took a deep breath and marched straight into the hologram. For a moment, the ripples of light blinded him, but once he stepped fully within the perimeter, his vision returned. Now surrounded by the graveyard scene, he studied the area. Several paces away to his front and to each side, the scene blurred, as if a wall of fog blocked his view. Could these fogbanks be boundaries to the next world’s dream?
Standing still for a moment, he listened. The only noise his earpieces transmitted sounded like the whooshing of a breeze, evidenced by the occasional wisp of fog that blew slowly past.