The Very Last Days of Mr Grey (27 page)

She gasped, quite despite herself. Her hand went to her chest, small black purse sliding into the crook of her mildly arthritic elbow. The man before her was dead, of that there could be no mistake. But he was too dead. Like a prop in a movie. Her hand moved of its own accord to touch his cheek, and Ms Williams’s husband gave her a strange look.

He knew she’d known the boy, but now he wondered if he’d been more to her, perhaps the son they never had.

But Ms Williams wasn’t thinking of the miscarriage, or the fights which came after, the almost-infidelity. She was thinking of how real the skin felt under her fingers, how real it
was
. And yet, and yet…

“A husk… It’s like he’s not here,” she murmured, unwittingly echoing the sentiments of a little girl who was even now being led from the church, her mother disturbed by the things she was saying about the dead man who they, when it came down to it, hardly knew. They only had come because Mason Grey’s hometown had coincidentally been the same one Tom had moved to after the divorce—Los Angeles, where middle-aged men found trophy wives, she thought.

She squinted as they stepped outside into the sun, and made their way through the crowd to the overfilling parking lot.

They had paid their respects, and now it was time to go. They’d get ice cream, then maybe catch a short film, that 3D one Genevieve had been wanting to see. If she remembered right, it was short, just over an hour. Perhaps by then Genevieve would forget about her strange comments, and Tom wouldn’t get the satisfaction of knowing he’d been right.

But Genevieve wouldn’t forget, nor would she say anything of it to her father or the woman he lived with. And that night, in her new bed in her new room in her father’s new house with his new wife—but not her new mother—she would dream of a place where a boy who was a rabbit led a girl down a dark stairwell, where people took medicine that was somehow fragile, where there were dragons, and elves, and fairies, and other things, darker things, like unformed shadows, like unarticulated remainders. And in the middle of it all, the center of her dream world, was something large, something that was everywhere, yet just in one place.

What is it?
she thought.

The answer arose from the Aether.
Blunderbuss
, came the reply, carried by a wind that didn’t exist. And with that, her dream faded to black.

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—Jack

This book takes place in a world begun in The Dream Engine. Here is a summary of that book:

A truth terrible enough to bury for a millennium …
A mysterious boy calling in her sleep …
A secret city that shouldn’t exist …
When Eila Doyle first sees the strange boy beckoning in whispers from somewhere deep in her imagination, she questioned her sanity. She was used to seeing strange things with her eyes closed — that’s what Eila did all day while strapped to the Blunderbuss, Building whatever the Ministry of Manifestation required — but never before have those images felt so real, or so dangerous.
After Eila learns the terrible truth about her reality and the monsters inside it, she thinks that maybe madness might be her only escape...
This thrilling young adult steampunk adventure is the first in the Dream Engine series by masters of story Platt & Truant, authors of The Beam, Unicorn Western, and many more.

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to check it out.