The Waking Dreamer (28 page)

“It is done. And yet, it is just beginning. You sense this, don’t you?”

“You say that as if I’m special in some way.”

“Strength is often not measureable until it has been sufficiently tested.”

“I have the gift of the Mara, don’t I? I’m a Dreamer.”

“You are the last one who will see things that the others cannot; things that must be seen in your age. When the people of your age can no longer see, then death becomes an end rather than a beginning.”

Emmett had been preparing himself to hear that he was entirely unremarkable and that there was nothing special about him. He wasn’t sure what to say now that he knew the opposite was true.

“I’m the Waking Dreamer.”

The Archivist’s eyes twinkled under the shadow of the mighty tree, and though some of her features remained hidden, Emmett thought he could almost see the crinkling of her face from an unseen smile.

“It would appear that you are.”

“What does that mean? Who am I really?”

“Who do you think you are?”

Had Emmett his body, he would have shrugged. Only weeks before, the question would have seemed meaningless. His name was Emmett Jonathan Brennan. He was nearly eighteen years old. He had no family or home. He was just a name and an age.

“You are quite more than a name. You may not realize your impact until you see another person give their life for you.”

Emmett saw Keiran’s face smiling at him. That Cheshire cat grin that seemed so amused by Emmett’s dry sarcasm and endless film references. He saw Amala’s face visiting him each night in his dreams, telling him he would one day save her even though it had been her up until this moment who had been saving him.

“Keiran and Amala were ready to give their lives for me. How do I even begin to deserve something like that?”

“When you no longer have to ask, then you will have earned it.”

Emmett thought of the attack in the forest. His anxiety for his friends rolled outward from his awareness, upsetting the graceful animals around the great tree. The lion shook his mane heavily, the gorillas pounded their fists on the ground, and the elephants trumpeted nervously.

The Archivist cooed the animals, and soon all were settled
.

Emmett saw that a glassy image had formed in the air. He saw himself lying on the ground with the large figure hovering over him. All was frozen in time: Oliver and Keiran lunging toward the figure as Rhiannon and Amala prepared to strike. Nothing was happening in that moment, though it still appeared as if they were in danger.

“That is my Attendant.”

Emmett thought of Dr. Hazrat’s Attendant, young Eitan, and he willed his awareness to look deeper into the image suspended in the air. Whereas young Eitan was petite, cultured, well mannered, and appropriately manicured, the Archivist’s Attendant was the farthest concept from human civilization.

“Not the warmest welcome, really.”

He saw that the form crouched over him was actually a woman: wild, untamed hair snarled with leaves and twigs caught in unkempt tufts, with layers of furs or skins woven together covering her body. She looked like someone who lived entirely in the wild, her face hidden mostly by her overgrown hair and her brown eyes alight with a feral sort of fire.

She was clearly powerful. Emmett could remember now how she moved through the air with speed that outpaced even the Druids and Bards, who themselves moved with alacrity far greater than he had ever seen another human capable of. Yet the Attendant had not attacked any of them, deftly avoiding their attacks to finally reach Emmett, which had immediately pushed his awareness into this communion with the Archivist.

“Next time just say hello and save everyone the bother of fighting.”

“Her posture was not due to your presence.”

Emmett recalled the procession of spirits fleeing through the forest. Again, he felt the heavy burden as he understood that his friends still were in danger.

“It’s an Old One, isn’t it? The Hag has come for me.”

“Not the Hag, Emmett. It is time that you finally remember.”

The Archivist raised a hand pointed at his head. Suddenly, Emmett’s mind reeled under the weight of memories that raced to the surface. He was watching the moments following his birth, staring up into the green luna moths fluttering about the Archivist’s face. Amala the child was holding him, staring down at him. She was trembling now, frightened by the red eyes that had come for Emmett. The Grinning Man was searching for Emmett, the Waking Dreamer. It was not yet time. Then the Archivist named The Grinning Man just as Keiran named the Hag, and he was gone. Only to torment his mother in the hospital, searching for Emmett, until finally she died.

“He came for me!”

“The Grinning Man is the harbinger of the Waking Dreamer, the final Mara of this age. The Grinning Man will take you, Emmett. And his Master will finally kill all the Children of the Earth.”

The shadow cast by the tree overhead widened, and a coldness he had not felt blew through him. His mind focused upward to see a sky swollen suddenly with dark storm clouds like black shadows that stretched across the horizon. Emmett felt a tenseness pulse through the area as animals shifted nervously, many bounding away into the grasses as great winds whipped along.

Emmett’s mind was finally pulling all of the pieces together.

“Amala knew I was the Waking Dreamer all along.”

“You are intertwined, as you always have been.”

Emmett thought of her Companion, Keiran, and he saw the Archivist nod
.

“So is Keiran. Their journey is the Waking Dreamer’s journey.”

“Which is what? What am I supposed to do?”

“It has already begun, and it begins tonight. The Master sends The Grinning Man for you, and for the Children you will face him.”

“Who is the Master? Who is this patron?”

“The Rugged Mountain. The Unremarkable Man. He is the Second and is chief amongst the Old Ones. He is the true darkness of the world.”

Already Emmett saw that the great shadow overhead had darkened the valley and swallowed the suspended image in the air.

“Banish The Grinning Man, Emmett. Then go to the Lady Karina with Keiran and Amala. Your journey is theirs, too. It always has been, and it always will be. There is something important in Noronha for you next to learn.”

Emmett felt the urgency of the moment as his consciousness began to fold in on itself, his mind racing with a tangle of half-formed questions
.

“What about Silvan Dea? Your Grove has been destroyed. What do they do?”

The Archivist seemed to sigh with the feathery touch of her consciousness on his own.

“Let the dead remain dead, Emmett.”

Before Emmett could respond, he felt himself plummeting backward into a black void bereft of color or sound. With shocking awareness, sensation and feeling shot through his limbs like electricity, and his watery eyes opened to a starry, crisp night.

CHAPTER 28

A
s he opened his eyes, Emmett felt the soft tickling of something touching his nose. Hair. No. A leaf? A leaf wound in hair. His eyes struggled to focus, and as darkness separated, he saw a face half-hidden by a mass of unkempt, wild hair staring silently at him.

The Archivist’s Attendant.

The world responded as if it had been paused, and there was a sudden rush of movement as the two Druids and Bards who obviously did not know her identity and thought she was attacking Emmett leapt with a flurry of coordinated attacks.

Amala’s swinging serpents were the first to reach her, and though the Attendant did not move off of Emmett, she ducked to the side just as Rhiannon brought her iron stave down across a spot where the Attendant’s head had been only moments before. Oliver and Keiran followed with bellowing attacks of concussive sound that the Attendant dodged as she rolled away and scuttled across the ground on hands and knees before bounding up to the limbs of a tree nearly twenty feet overhead.

Emmett’s mind started into action as he jumped up with his hands above him and bolted in the path of the Archivist’s Attendant between the attacking Children.

“Wait! Stop! She’s the Archivist’s Attendant!”

As one, all four paused mid-attack, and had he not seen the look of utter disbelief in Keiran’s eyes he might have forgotten that he was standing so easily on his own, waving his hands wildly in a pattern that should have been painful.

“Emmett?” Amala asked tentatively, her hand reaching out toward him as if to see if he were truly standing on his own.

Emmett looked down at his chest as he pulled his coat aside. He knew what was happening before he saw it, but he had to see it with his own eyes. Ripping apart the buttons on his shirt under his coat, he exposed his skin to the damp Appalachian air. His pale skin was still mottled and black with the Rot’s disease. He knew something had changed, because the suffocating tightness and throbbing pain was completely gone.

Amala reached him first, staring at his exposed chest. She raised a finger toward the Rot. When her finger grazed the edge near the center of his torso, the blackened skin seemed to crumble away like a fine dusting of soot. With a clean breeze rich with pine, the Rot’s final remnants blew away from his torso to reveal healed flesh that was whole, pink, and supple.

“Praise her,” Rhiannon breathlessly whispered as she lowered her stave and fell to her knees.

“She did it,” Amala whispered, kneading her fingers along Emmett’s chest and feeling his heartbeat. “She said you would make it.”

“Brilliant!” Keiran said, and Emmett saw that tears had come to his eyes. Even Oliver was nodding to Emmett with an expression of satisfaction.

Emmett felt a moment’s reprieve, wishing he could embrace each of them. He wanted to take Amala into his arms and celebrate the life that had nearly been taken from him. He wanted to scream out into the night with the freedom that he had from the Rot.

But he could not. They did not have time.

Purpose and knowing, the kind of confidence Emmett had never known before, suddenly focused him. He walked toward the Attendant. Amala and Rhiannon were behind him, along with Keiran, and Oliver seemed to be standing a respectful but noticeable distance back.

“Attendant?” Emmett called out, unsure how to properly address her. “Can you come down here, please?”

Emmett watched as she tilted her head, silently staring at him crouched on the large tree limb high above them. Her motions were feral, primal, and Emmett wondered if she could even understand what he was saying to her.

As if in response, she leapt down, falling easily within feet of them on her hands and feet like a feline. Her face arched up and her eyes regarded Emmett beneath the mass and tangle of hair.

“How long has she been in the wilderness?” Keiran asked.

“I thought you were dead,” Rhiannon whispered. She drew close with obvious familiarity, but the feral, unrecognizing look in the Attendant’s eye caused her to slowly back away.

“Not dead,” the Attendant croaked as if she had not spoken for years.

Emmett was beginning to understand everything now. How, he could not say. But things that the Archivist had said were beginning to make greater sense.

“You’ve been in hiding, haven’t you? You’ve been waiting?”

The Attendant nodded, and Emmett knew without saying aloud that the Attendant had been waiting for him. To serve as the conduit to the Archivist, the Elder who for reasons known only to her could not be present for what was coming.

“He’s coming now, isn’t he?” In a distant part of his mind, Emmett was confused that the question had come not from the Attendant, but from Amala standing beside him. As his mind raced through Ellie’s story and the Archivist’s visions, the meaning of his childhood dreams suddenly became clear.

The Grinning Man was coming for Emmett.

Something crashed into the van, a violent and brutal shock of force that blew it apart and sent burning metal careening in all directions with a plume of fire into the air. They were thrown outward, and somehow, instinctively, Emmett threw his hands over his face as he tumbled like a rag doll through the air and was showered in an explosion of shattered glass. Emmett felt the wind pushed from his lungs as he slammed into a distant tree and fell backward onto the ground, his vision a blur of blinking lights.

Several moments of unimaginable pain passed before Emmett felt something touching his head. He fell forward limply into a pair of strong arms that dragged him through piercing wreckage into a chilling, foggy air that assaulted his exposed skin. His eyes swam into bleary focus, feeling dull pain throughout his body that was crisscrossed by interlacing cuts from broken glass along the ground. He coughed dryly, unable to stop himself as he continued to violently heave for air. Though the Rot was free from his body finally, everywhere he ached from the van’s explosion.

He heard a commotion several yards from him. He saw the Attendant, her arms cut badly with deep wounds running down her face, dragging Amala away from the burning wreckage and dropping her next to Keiran’s motionless body on the ground next to Emmett. Emmett could not tell Keiran or Amala’s condition, but he saw in the Attendant’s stagger that she, too, was badly injured.

Oliver lay unmoving on the ground far away from them, having been thrown in the opposite direction. Rhiannon, too, was crumpled in a heap some distance from him. Burning into the Appalachian night, the van’s fire blazed from its torn engine as flaming rubber and smoking, smoldering metal combined with a toxic cloud of burning oil to blanket the area in a suffocating haze.

Something in the air demanded Emmett’s attention. He felt it presently. It was grave and oppressive like an immense weight. The hair on his arms stood on end, and Emmett felt something crushing against his ears. There were painfully low sounds reverberating within his mind like a bellow from the deepest point in the earth, gathering strength as it echoed up an impossibly long tunnel.

Emmett clawed at his ears, fearing he might go mad from the sound. He searched the area for the source and saw nothing but the burning van. Whatever
it
was, it felt both maddeningly distant and somehow all around him, charging the air with a sort of electricity that could alight a thousand fires if given the dry kindling to do so.

The Attendant was crouched low to the ground like a wild cat, and though she did not move, her eyes darted around as she seemed to sense the presence. She stood upright suddenly, and with great, visible effort, turned around in wide, sweeping circles. Blood dripped down from her wild hair as her eyes seemed to almost swim in and out of focus.

“Show yourself,” she growled as if she were still finding how to speak.

The Attendant was answered with a deep booming sound that was the crashing of waves against unyielding cliffs. There was mocking laughter whose breadth nearly made Emmett’s ears bleed. They popped again under the enormous pressure, and as he feebly tried to cover his ears with his hands, he strained to see where the laughter came from.

Across from them near the empty cabin, a fog was rolling toward them. Curtains of fog folded over each other in thick layers as the fog grew heavy and low to the ground, soon covering much of the cabin as it stalked toward where the van had exploded.

Suddenly, the living whorls of fog parted, and a tall figure stepped forward from the darkness itself of the forest beyond. Standing taller than any of them, it was covered entirely in shadow as the fog itself whirled in tendrils covering most of its features. Yet clearly through the mists and shadows, pouring itself into a shape from the fog itself, Emmett saw a pair of glowing red eyes staring from the fog, eyes that lacked any white or black to separate the swimming color of blood that preternaturally illuminated the darkness. Below the eyes was a wide, grinning mouth.

Emmett saw Ellie and his mother in his mind as their living nightmare, The Grinning Man, stepped forth from shadow.

The Attendant still had not moved, her head tilting back and forth as if assessing The Grinning Man. Emmett did not know what her powers and strengths were versus the Old One. She was certainly more powerful than four Bards and Druids, which meant that if she could not defeat the creature, none of them could.

He heard a moaning next to him and saw Amala beginning to slowly stir, struggling to lift her head.

The unnatural rows of white teeth seemed to chatter as the creature laughed again. It was scornful, hateful laughter as if it delighted in the suffering of a mother weeping over the loss of her own child. It abhorred all manner of life; indeed, it loathed and reviled all of them. It laughed cruelly at the fear it engendered in them from which it drew and wielded its great power.

Emmett and Amala both ground their teeth and clutched their hands over their ears. The laughter was maddening, penetrating Emmett’s mind and forcing its way through him as if it would literally tear him apart.

A Bard’s call, at once plaintive and pleading with the tenor notes of a mourning lament, dimly reached over the cacophonous laughter, suffusing Emmett with momentary courage. He looked over, expecting to see Keiran struggling to hold his note, lifting his voice to channel energy and strength to his friends. But Keiran was still collapsed in an unmoving slump beside Amala.

Oliver staggered up to his knees as he bellowed over The Grinning Man’s laughter. Struggling to stand just at the edge of the rolling fog, his hands were spread wide as he channeled the core of his being into a desperate, final song; a healing song that had already roused Rhiannon from her stupor and was beginning to stir Keiran, too.

The figure’s laughter ceased long enough for its red eyes to cast their preternatural glow toward Oliver. A single, gloved hand rose out of the mist and made a sort of shooing gesture with two fingers in Oliver’s direction. At once, an invisible force lifted Oliver easily into the air and sent him flying backward a dozen yards away, slamming him against a tree and crashing down to the ground motionless.

“No!” Rhiannon screamed. With stave in hand and her hawk circling overhead, she exploded into a flurry of motion that Emmett’s eyes could scarcely follow. Sprinting forward, she was steps from the figure before it raised its gloved hand again and made the same gesture, sending Rhiannon hurtling backward into the air before she landed in a heap of charred metal.

The laughter was elevated now as the figure glided forward on the rolling fog. Amala was fighting bravely to stand but was still unable to do so. Emmett struggled to right himself, to resist or to fight for his friends’ lives. The creature was coming for him, and too often already these people had bravely stepped in front of him to defend him, giving their lives to protect someone that they had barely known. If it meant his own death, he would die trying to save his friends, to call out with some power or do something.

“No,” the Attendant growled finally as the creature came within yards of them. The fog surrounding it continued to billow and swirl as if alive and responsive to the being that it enshrouded. The rows of bone-white teeth trembled again under its maddening laughter.

A voice intruded into their minds. It was a sound of parents raping their own children. The words burrowed painfully beneath his skin like maggots, as if carved into his skull with a dull, rusty blade wielded by a madman who delighted in the suffering that he caused.

Stand aside, monkey.

“No,” the Attendant repeated with greater force in her feral voice.

The Waking Dreamer shall now serve his Master.

“No.” It was not the Attendant’s voice this time. It was Emmett’s.

Emmett forced himself to his knees, grinding his teeth against the pain. The Grinning Man’s mouth turned sideways as if evaluating Emmett for the first time.

Little baby boy
,
you still stink of your mommy’s insides. I can smell them on the wind. Perhaps you would permit me a taste.

Emmett remembered the terror in his mother’s face staring into the corner of her hospital room. He saw the child Amala trembling as she held Emmett in her arms in the abandoned basement.

The meddler will no longer deny me.

The Attendant leapt through the air at the figure, landing atop him just as a pair of gloved hands reached up from the fog and snatched both of her arms. Both struggled as the ground beneath them trembled with the force of their combined powers.

“Emmett?” a voice weakly called out. Amala was struggling to lift her head, beckoning Emmett to her. He knelt beside her, cradling her head in his hands just as she had once held him in her arms. He lowered his head to her so that her hand was touching the side of his face.

“You told me he would return for us and you would banish him.”

“When?” Emmett asked.

“In
my
life’s dreams,” she answered, the light in her amber eyes growing dim.

Emmett felt panic as he watched life drain from her face. He was neither an Elder nor a Bard, commanded no measure of power to summon and wield.