Dreamfire (26 page)

“Did that make any sense at all?” he asked.

“I think,” Josh said slowly, “that if we pull this off, we'll win the Nicastro Prize in Dream Theory for young dream walkers. It comes with a college scholarship.”

“We're really doing something that groundbreaking?”

“No, we're doing something that
clever
.”

She had never given him that look before, a look of admiration and excitement. The look clung between them like static electricity, and he wondered how big the spark would be if he touched her.

“But I see a major problem,” she said, bringing him down from his high. “Like Whim said, we don't know how to find Feodor's universe. If we just build an archway, it will automatically open to the Dream. How do we get the archway to open to Feodor's universe instead?”

“Oh,” Will said. “It could take a while to solve that.”

It took them four days.

*   *   *

They waited until everyone had gone to bed. They'd taken the night shift so that they could be assured six hours alone in the archroom. First they built a second frame around the empty doorframe from the armoire they'd broken before. Then Josh and Will meticulously hot-glued the mirrors into the empty doorframes, tilting each one to the correct angle.

“Are we sure this is safe?” Will asked, squeezing hot glue onto the back of a two-by-two-inch mirror.

He was having a case of buyer's regret. Maybe because he and Josh had been up until two that morning figuring out how to arrange the mirrors; or maybe because they'd found the information in an article originally written in Swedish and he wasn't entirely confident of the Internet's translation; or maybe because he had just realized that pleasing Josh might not be a good enough reason to risk opening a porthole between universes. But he suspected he would gladly do stupid things to get her to look at him again the way she had the afternoon they'd come up with this plan.

“We can't be sure,” Josh admitted. She was using an X-Acto knife to slice wine corks into wedges the exact right angle to prop up the mirrors. “But the book said that the further you get from the violet end of the spectrum, the fewer layers you cut through. We won't cut deeper than yellow, and that's pretty far from violet.”

“What if other parts of the spectrum pierce other universes? What if red pierces hell?”

She stopped cutting to look up at him. “Do you even believe in hell?”

“Actually, no. But that's not the point. What if something comes out?”

“Then we'll shoot it.”

Hoping for some sort of reassurance, he asked, “Have you ever done anything like this before?”

He expected Josh to say no and give him another excuse. Instead, she turned as white as full-spectrum light and dropped the cork in her hand. She might as well have fainted, the change in her demeanor was so sudden.

“Am I being arrogant?” she asked, her voice dazed. “Am I doing this for the wrong reasons?”

“What?” Will said, startled. “No. Of course not.”

“You'd tell me if I were, wouldn't you?”

He didn't understand how questioning their process had led to Josh's questioning her motives and judgment. “Hey, I'm the apprentice, remember? I don't know anything. My whole job is to freak out when we do the scary stuff.”

“You were right to tell me not to go in the Dream last time,” she said in a numbed voice. “And you were right to come in after me. Sorry I shouted at you.”

“It's okay.” Will moved a pile of mirrors to one side so he could scoot across the floor and put his arm around her. She was always in so much pain, and he was always helpless to do anything about it. “I forgave you for all that a week ago, remember?”

She sat and stared at him, lips parted, breathing shallowly, and he felt her weighing something, arguing with herself. Finally, she said, in a confessional whisper, “I was arrogant once, and someone got hurt.”

Ian. She means Ian.

He wondered what she had done. Had she knocked over a candle and started the fire that killed him? Had she asked him to run back inside the burning cabin and save something for her? Had she twisted an ankle and needed saving?

It never crossed his mind that she was truly responsible for Ian's death.

But looking at the tears in her pale, pale eyes, he knew that she believed she had killed Ian.

How terrible to believe such a thing,
he thought,
to carry that knowledge around. No wonder she always looks sad.

Will wished he knew better how to comfort her. He wanted to kiss her forehead, but her boundaries were so tall and so impassable; he was afraid the gesture would go awry. “Everybody makes mistakes, Josh.” He gave her a squeeze instead of the kiss and added, “I'm sorry I'm giving you such a hard time. I'm just nervous. I get kind of cranky when I'm nervous.”

Josh seized on the opportunity to lighten the conversation. “It's a defense mechanism?” she asked, and then she smiled, because they both knew she'd learned the term from him.

“It's a defense mechanism,” he agreed. “Look, forget about worst-case scenarios and maybes. Just tell me this: do you believe, deep down, that we can do this?”

She was quiet for a long time, her eyes lingering on the doorframe in front of them. Then she looked back at Will, and there was a new certainty in her face. She nodded.

“Then we'll do it,” he said.

When they had finished with the mirrors, they propped the doorframe up against the wall. They'd purchased four miniature lanterns and fitted each with a metal hood. By punching holes in the hoods and covering the holes with gel filters, they created lanterns that put out single beams of colored light. The gel filters had been hard to come by in the exact shades necessary, and they'd had to turn to Deloise, who talked to one of her drama-geek friends, who pointed them toward a theater-supply company.

Finally, they attached one of the lanterns to the top of the exterior doorframe, lit it, and sent a beam of red light shooting between the mirrors.

By that time, Will didn't really expect anything to happen. The mirrors, the corks, the gel filters, all that hot glue—what kind of magic was performed with hot glue? The longer they had worked and the more their creation resembled something from the set of a grade-school play, the less anxious he felt. All of this would turn out to be for nothing. He was sure of it.

Still, when it came time to open the window, he waited until Josh had gotten a 9mm SIG Sauer from the gun locker and loaded it before he actually opened the archway. Will had fired that gun exactly once before going back to Deloise's .22; the 9mm kicked all the way up his shoulder.

They dragged their doorframe and extra lanterns into the archroom, and Josh said, “All right, key check.”

Will pulled his lighter and compact out of his pocket and watched Josh do the same. She frowned at the blue plastic lighter. “I wish I hadn't lost my Zippo.”

“It was nice,” Will agreed.

She glanced at him. “It was a gift,” she said shortly, and Will knew he had bumped one of her sore spots again. But she shook it off and said, “You set?”

“Set.”

“Then let's do it.”

This was the most tenuous part of the plan, and if it didn't work, the whole endeavor was kaput: Will was supposed to direct the looking stone to show them the part of the Dream Feodor's universe had been cut from. After a good fifteen different plans—most of them complicated and requiring much travel—they had come up with this simple idea. They were hoping that when Feodor's universe was cut from the Dream, it had left a scar, like an amputated limb, and that if they opened an archway within the Dream right on top of the scar, it would lead to Feodor's universe instead of the World.

“What's wrong?” Josh asked when Will just stood and stared at the looking stone.

Will shrugged. “I don't know how to begin.”

“Just do what you'd normally do.”

Beginning turned out to be the easy part—he pressed his palm to the looking stone and closed his eyes, and suddenly the Dream was all around him. He felt the wind whipping by him as he stood on the crest of a mountain, heard car tires peel water off the surface of a highway, smelled the sunsetlike odor of fresh-baked bread. Then, almost as soon as he identified each sense, the input narrowed to a single dream in which a young girl gathered flowers in a field.

She had no idea what was slithering about in the high grass.

“We have to go in,” Will said, opening his eyes as he spoke.

Josh grabbed his shoulders. “We can't go in, remember?”

Through the archway, Will watched the girl whip her head around at the sound of something moving through the grass. She wanted to believe it was just the breeze.…

“Will,” Josh said. She grabbed his chin and forced him to face her. “Find Feodor.”

Feodor
. For a moment Will rebelled, certain that nothing could be more important than saving that little girl, but as hissing began on one side of the field, then the other, he knew that even if he hadn't had other priorities, he wouldn't have gone through. He had no defense against a plague of flesh-eating snake-worms.

The little girl shrieked once, then vanished beneath the high grass.

“Feodor,” Josh said again, and Will closed his eyes.

The Dream bombarded him again: the crackle of burning wood, moldy garbage, bank deposit slips. Will tried to sort through the dreams, to pull back from them until he reached the edges of the Dream, but there were no edges, only a gentle curve that made him think he traveled over the inner surface of a sphere. It felt as slick as ice, and he spun across it, not sure what he was doing or if he was getting anywhere, if he covered miles or inches, if hours or minutes had passed.

Wait—what was that?

He'd passed over something, a place where two dreams fit together incorrectly. Will struggled to slow his sliding and turn around, and then it took a while of blind searching to find that spot again, the one that felt like a record needle jumping from one track to the next. “Here, I think,” he told Josh.

“You found it?” She sounded surprised.

“Maybe. I found something.”

Opening his eyes, he saw a dream parking lot located behind a strip mall, where several Dumpsters were piled high with trash. A few feet from the Dumpsters, a line ran through the scene from the sky to the ground, and on the other side of it, an angry nun in an elaborate wimple was walking up and down the aisles of a classroom, smacking her ruler against her palm and watching the children scribble on handheld blackboards. The two scenes looked like photographs cut down the middle and laid side by side.

“That's so weird,” Josh said.

Will stood up, keeping his hand on the looking stone. Josh snapped her 9mm into a hip holster, then grabbed the mirror-laden armoire door and carried it through the archway into the parking lot. When the Dream allowed her easy entrance, Will followed with the extra lanterns.

On the strip-mall side, the sun was shining. Actually, several suns were shining. The labels on the Dumpsters were in what was clearly meant to be an alien script, and Will noticed that the trash bags appeared to be breathing.

“Ah, this nightmare might be picking up speed,” Will said. “We should do this fast.”

Josh grew still and thoughtful the way she often did before she had an insight about a nightmare. Will was beginning to develop a theory about what she was actually doing during these moments, and it wasn't thinking, but now wasn't the time to bring it up.

“Agreed,” she said after a few seconds. “Where should I put this thing?”

They propped the armoire door against the rear wall of Bebe's Exotic Reptiles, then scooted it to the right until one half overlapped with the nun's classroom. By scooting it, they were also able to avoid detection from the cranky nun.

They'd agreed that Will would perform the actual opening so that Josh could aim the gun. Not that—if their plan worked—anything would come out of the archway, but they'd agreed to err far on the side of caution, and Josh was still a much better shot than Will. So he relit the lantern affixed to the top of the doorframe and watched as the ruby light bounced between the mirrors. Using a second lantern and starting at the top of the doorway, he traced the lattice of ruby-colored beams all the way around. He hadn't understood most of what he'd read, but what he had gotten was that the actual opening occurred because of how the lights intersected, and if the beam he directed lost contact with the network inside the doorway, even by a millimeter, the whole thing would fail.

Will worked very, very slowly.

By the time he reached the top of the doorway again, his arms were shaking and he had to grip the lantern with both hands. Just before he completed the pattern, Josh said, “Careful,” and he stepped to the side of the door. As soon as he retraced the beginning of the pattern, the first layer of the Veil fell out of the doorframe.

Will only saw the first layer as a disturbance like heat in the air until it hit the blacktop, where the entire pane turned into red glass and shattered.

“Nice work,” Josh said afterward.

Will rested his arms for a minute, then switched the red lanterns for the orange ones and repeated the entire process. The second layer felt like a piece of cloth made of light and warmth, and it broke over Will and turned to fairy dust that coated his arms and the red glass at his feet.

Josh walked up to the armoire door, stepping carefully through the glass shards, and reached out and tried to put her hand through the doorframe—a surface stopped her. She rapped her knuckles against it, but it made no sound.

“It worked,” Josh said, her voice breathy. “I'll be damned.”

“Where's Feodor's universe?” Will asked. At the moment all he could see through the doorframe was a misty gray haze. “Should I do the third layer?”