Dreamfire (7 page)

His steps weren't hesitant, but they were measured. “Nice house,” he said. He thought to wipe his filthy shoes on the mat before stepping onto the living-room carpet.

The entire household—five people—was waiting in the living room. Even Josh's father had gotten out of bed to meet the apprentice. Except for Dustine—who sat, a queen in a rocking-chair throne—they were all standing and facing the door like badgers waiting outside a snake hole. Will stiffened visibly at the sight.

“You guys having a party?” he asked.

“The Avishes live here,” Josh told him. “The house is a triplex.”

She made quick introductions, aware that the warmth with which everyone greeted Will confused him further. Halfway through, he tilted his head toward Josh and whispered, “What's your name again?”

Wonderful.
“Josh Weaver. This is Winsor, the blonde is Deloise.”

“Deloise I know,” he told her as Winsor's father clapped a hand around his.

“It's good to meet you, son,” Alex said brightly. He was unstoppably sociable, which was partly where Winsor's brother got it. Of course, Whim generally managed to be less tedious and irritating. “It'll be nice to have some fresh blood around the place, and no one better to learn from than Josh!”

“Yeah,” Will agreed in a voice anyone but Alex would have recognized as completely baffled. Alex began to wring Will's hand like it was a stiff doorknob.

Josh took a step back to whisper to Deloise, “I have no idea what to do,” while Alex started off on a speech about having a positive work ethic.

“I guess … What would you have done with Louis?” Deloise whispered back.

“Sat him down at the kitchen table and told him I had a surprise. It would have been melodramatic but he would have listened. Will's likely to bolt at any time.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I say we go for the shock tactic. Once we're in-Dream, he'll have to listen to us.”

“What if he panics and runs off? We'll never find him if the Dream shifts.”

“In which case we can recruit Louis tomorrow,” Josh finished, with much more bravado than she felt. “Look, Will seems like he can keep his head on straight. I'll just take him downstairs and show him the archway. If we just tell him what's going on, he's going to think we're crazy.”

“I guess.…” Deloise repeated.

“Go grab Winsor and meet us in the archroom.”

“Okay.” Deloise headed for the kitchen, where Winsor had vanished with the pizzas. Josh stepped forward so that she, Alex, and Will formed a triangle. “And in the end, those long hours count,” Alex was saying. “Sure, we might not see it in this lifetime, but they count.”

“I'm still not sure exactly what you do,” Will began, and Josh quickly cut in.

“Which is why I think we should go down to the workroom,” she said. “That way I can show you.”

“The workroom?” Will asked. He eyed Josh skeptically. She had assumed that his auburn hair was dyed, but his eyelashes were the same color. “Downstairs?”

“Excellent idea,” Alex told them.

Will seemed to consider that for a moment, and she wasn't sure what he was going to do. Then he shrugged. “O-kay,” he said, breaking the syllables. “Let's go see the workroom.”

Josh led him down the hallway, past the little library full of family histories and the diaries of dream walkers long dead, and down the staircase that led to the basement where, twenty-four hours before, she and a hundred guests had celebrated her birthday and put this whole mess in motion.

The archroom was built into the farthest corner of the basement. It had two entrances, one of which was the secret passage in the upstairs kitchen pantry. That one had been built when the house was designed back in the 1920s, and the bank-vault entrance had been added when the house was renovated, doubling its size, in 1953.

Josh had to type an access code into the panel on the wall before the steel door would open. Will gave her an odd look, but he didn't say anything as the basement filled with the sounds of internal bolts drawing back. Josh opened the door and beckoned him inside.

He stared at the white floor and curved white walls with obvious alarm. Josh knew they looked like every secret FBI interrogation room ever shown on television, but what the FBI didn't have in the middle of their rooms was a seven-foot-high archway made of straw mortar and chunks of stone. The two pillars grew from the foundations of the house straight up through the bleached tile floor. In front of the archway sat a metal folding chair, and beside that, a Bible-sized slab of what appeared to be red glass rested three feet aboveground atop a steel rod.

When the door closed with a hiss of air pressure, Will stepped gingerly across the floor to look more closely at the arch. Josh didn't want to show him any nightmares until she had Winsor and Deloise to back her up (despite the fact that they hadn't been too much help up until now) so she waited by the door while he made his examination.

“So this is your … workshop,” Will said.

“Yeah.”

He circled the archway, and the room fell silent. Josh didn't know what to say. They'd gone to school together since … ninth grade, at least, but they'd never run in the same circles, and obviously he didn't recognize her or else he wouldn't have asked her name.

“What kind of work do you do?” he asked without looking at her.

She was trying to come up with a response when she saw his hand moving toward the flat piece of red glass that was mounted near the archway. “No!” she heard herself shout, but Will's palm had already made full contact.

At first Josh clung to the hope that he wasn't in tune enough with the Dream for anything to happen. Then she saw him shut his eyes hard.

She had been joking about hurling him into the Dream as a shock tactic. It didn't seem funny now.

“Will,” Josh said firmly, “
don't move
.”

His eyes opened, but he didn't appear to register her. An image flickered across the soap-bubble Veil—a little boy in pajamas cowering in his bedroom.

How did he do that? Two seconds and he's already found a nightmare?

Under other circumstances, she would have been impressed.

Meepa the Albino Koala appeared on the Veil. Josh recognized her instantly—a number of children had endured nightmares about the internationally televised Australian puppet. In this dream, Meepa was so large that she filled an entire doorway, her rounded ears brushing the ceiling. Her eyes and nose, normally a dark pink, glowed bright red, and when she opened her mouth, her lips pulled taut over curved fangs.

“Oh god,” Will whispered. “There's a kid…”

Meepa stalked the dark hallway, rays of red light pulsating from her eyes. In one hand, she carried a Louisville Slugger.

Josh tore her eyes away from the bizarre image just in time to see Will take two steps through the archway. “No!” she shouted again, but when she tried to grab him, she felt herself pulled forward, and they both tumbled into the Dream.

*   *   *

They landed hard in the middle of a living room. Will swore and rolled to his knees, his head hanging down as if he might throw up. Josh was already on her feet. The living room was tidy, lacking details as dreams often did. No pictures on the walls, no knickknacks. A long red couch overlapped an end table. The television loomed over the room, several times larger than was practical. The ceiling was cathedral height and the corners faded into gray oblivion.

Josh had enough experience to know that all of this—the couch and the end table occupying the same space, the disproportionate furniture, the colors that washed away as if they had never been fully thought through—indicated that they were in a child's dream. These were often the most unstable of dreams, and the Dream was unstable to begin with.

“Get up,” she said to Will. She offered him her hand and he took it, groaning.

“What happened?”

There was no time to break the news gently. “We're in the middle of a child's nightmare about being attacked by Meepa the Albino Koala.”

Will turned his head quickly from side to side, looking at everything around them as if to check her theory for himself. Enough light shone for her to see him clearly, but where it came from she couldn't have said; no lamps were on and pure blackness stretched beyond the window.

“That's what I saw back there?” Will asked. “Somebody's nightmare?”

“That archway is an entrance to the Dream world we all share. When you touched it, you were able to see inside. When you walked through the archway, you entered the Dream.”

“But how—” he began, and she cut him off.

“There's no time. We have to get rid of the koala.”

For a split second she thought he would argue, but he said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Get behind me. Stay out of the way.”

“This doesn't even look like a real house,” he said as she stepped past him and into the hallway.

“It could change at any moment. Be ready for anything. Keep your eyes out for a weapon.”

“Here,” he said, and pulled a pocketknife out of his jeans. Josh took it and opened the larger of the two blades, glad Will hadn't tried to keep it for himself. She was betting she had more knife-fighting training than he did.

Ten feet ahead of her Meepa stood in the doorway to a bedroom and looked inside, her red eye lasers sweeping the room. She lifted the baseball bat with one paw, and her free paw dragged three claws down the wall beside the door, shredding the wallpaper. Josh faced her, holding out the knife.

This close, the nightmare swept over her. Physically, Josh felt cold inside and out. But worse was the bone-deep terror emanating from the child she knew was hiding in the bedroom. It wasn't the fear she felt at a scary movie or when Deloise snuck up behind her; it was closer to dread. She knew what was going to happen if Meepa found her. She knew that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. The inevitability was terrible.

Behind her, Will swore again as the fear hit him. His voice shook.

Josh blinked and imagined herself surrounded by strong stone walls. Before her father had ever let her enter the Dream, he'd taught her Stellanor's First Rule of dream walking:
Never let the dreamer's fear become your own.

If Will had given her a chance to explain all this, she would have taught him Stellanor's First Rule.

As it happened, Will managed to knock Josh down while rushing to the dreamer's rescue.

“Don't!” she shouted as she hit the floor on her knees, then her stomach. She had to let go of the knife in order to keep from stabbing herself.

Will took a few fast steps before launching himself into the air with a hysterical war cry. He landed on Meepa's back with his arms around the koala's neck.

Meepa growled deep in her round belly. She spun, trying to throw Will off, and instead saw Josh on the floor. Josh rolled onto her back just before the Slugger hit the spot where she had been lying. The hallway carpet vanished so quickly Josh couldn't even fully register the change before the baseball bat was breaking the wood beneath. The floor wasn't made up of unfinished floorboards like one would normally find beneath a carpet, but mahogany, like a polished tabletop. It shone in the sourceless light.

A child's dream. Full of misinformation.

Meepa thrashed from side to side again, and this time she succeeded in flinging Will off. Although his momentum wasn't so very great, it threw him not just against the wall but all the way through it, creating a large hole.

Oh shit,
Josh thought, but then she saw Will's hand appear out of the hole, so she scrambled to her feet to create a distraction.

“Hey!” she called. “Eucalyptus breath!” The taunt was dreadfully weak, but it was enough to bring Meepa thundering toward her. Josh dug in her pocket for her lighter. Between Meepa's thick, fuzzy legs, she saw a little boy in pajamas cowering just inside the bedroom doorway.

“Stay there!” Josh called to him, and when Will climbed back into the hallway through the hole in the wall, he stumbled over to stand in front of the dreamer.

That won him a lot of points with Josh.

Meepa's growl grew louder, like a scream trapped behind her teeth.
She's not nearly as articulate in person,
Josh thought as the puppet swung at her.

Crouching to duck the bat, Josh said calmly, “Will, your knife is on the floor.” As she straightened up, she flipped open the lighter and extended a flame between herself and Meepa. Polyester burned, didn't it?

Meepa halted and, without warning, the dream changed. Josh, Will, Meepa, and the child all kept their relative positions, but now they stood on a football field at the fifty-yard line. The grass was too green, like in Easter candy commercials. Stands surrounded the field, but beyond that the world faded into nothingness. The little boy was wearing a helmet and full football gear in the Packers' colors.

The kid rushed Meepa from behind. He only came to Meepa's knees, but when his bare hands made contact with the massive koala, she fell flat on her face as if punched in the back. The baseball bat vanished from her hands. Handcuffs in one chubby fist, the kid climbed on top of Meepa and started cuffing her.

“You have to remain silent and right,” the boy announced.

The air warmed suddenly. Josh let her lighter go out. Will lowered the knife in his hand.

The terror was gone. The nightmare was over. Relief and peace and gratefulness cradled them with hands like clouds.

Josh and Will stared at each other, both breathing hard, as the light above them grew brighter. Will grinned like they'd done something amazing together, and Josh wanted to grin back, but they fell out of the Dream before she had a chance.

*   *   *

The landing wasn't so hard this time. Josh felt the cool tile through the seat of her jeans and against the fist she had made around her lighter. She'd banged her right elbow when Will knocked her down, the same elbow she'd hit in-Dream the night before, and it hurt anew.