Chapters:

The First Nightmare

The First Nightmare

“Dad?”

Anna eased open a familiar vintage oak door and peered inside. Awake, she wouldn’t have dared approach the study. The rule had been drilled into her since childhood: no one goes in, not to ask questions, not to clean, not to bring dinner when Dad worked late.

But the dream world had its own rules. And besides, here, this wasn’t even Dad’s real study – it was just a collage of her own shoddy memories from the waking world. Dad’s office in Myriad was much grander, befitting of someone of his rank.

Yet for some reason the dream had started here, in the office from their home in Versiterre, so Anna pushed the door further open and went in. If Dad didn’t want her snooping around, she thought, then he shouldn’t have gone and disappeared.

The room was as familiar as could be expected, from the knots in the antique hardwood floor to the dreamcatchers in the recessed skylight – a mirror image of Anna’s décor in the next room. One window looked north over the reservoir behind the Quinn house, and beyond it to the Wompatuck Woods on the far side. The other window faced east over Dad’s garden and the lawn where the neighborhood kids played soccer.

A large weathered map of Myriad hung in a frame over the cluttered desk – yes, even there, in his Versiterre office. An overwrought antique wardrobe, green and gilded, crouched in the corner, almost hidden by the door as if it would have preferred not to be noticed, though Anna had always noticed it. She had always noticed it was locked.

In the dream, however, one gilded door hung slightly ajar, and Anna had the funniest feeling that Dad was hiding inside. Childlike joy bubbled up inside her and she leapt to open it—

Only to find the inside bare and dusty.

Dad wasn’t in there, and neither was any of his stuff. If there had once been shelves, drawers, or a pole for hanging clothes, they had been removed. Anna crouched to inspect the corners but found only dirt. She knocked on the walls, but found only echoes.

As she turned from the cabinet, an Oriental carpet materialized under her feet and bookshelves crowded the walls, which had retreated while she wasn’t looking, leaving her in a much larger room. Behind the desk, light streamed through floor-to-ceiling windows. Anna now looked out on massive purple mountains punching holes in a ceiling of fat white clouds, like pins in a cosmic pincushion.

On one level, Anna didn’t feel surprised. This was, after all, the way Dad’s office was supposed to look in the dream world. The overwrought wardrobe was here, too. It seemed natural that it should exist in both the humble office and the ornate one.

Yet as Anna continued turning, she could tell that something was wrong. Pieces of furniture that hadn’t been there on the first go-around suddenly tripped her up, while others abruptly went absent. It was wrong for the dream to be this unstable and jumbled. It was almost like a Sleeper’s dream, she thought. She should just be wherever she was; the setting shouldn’t keep changing like this.

On top of that, she had the very unpleasant sensation of being watched in that vague way that dreams have, by some undefinable “they.” She’d started out hunting but had become the hunted.

As Anna faced the windows again, she found Dad sitting at the desk with his glasses on and his head in his hand, reading with a creased brow. The ordinariness of him sitting there made her unduly happy, so happy that her chest hurt, even though he did not seem to notice her.

“Dad,” Anna said, wanting him to notice, wanting to scream at him, wanting to hug him, wanting to tell him she loved him, wanting to tell him she hated him for leaving her. But the voice that came out was not hers, and the question died in her throat. Who was she, if not Anna?

Her mouth went on without her, still speaking in that strange, high-pitched voice that wasn’t hers. “Are you going to tell us a story today?”

It was a child’s voice, Anna thought, and then it dawned: It was her voice… as it had sounded years ago. The desk came up to her ribs, and her hands… they were a child’s hands. On her feet, rather than the custom Chuck Taylors from Jesse that she always wore in the dream world, were a pair of glitter-encrusted ruby slippers.

She was herself, yes, but only a version of herself.

Herself as a child.

In this flickering place, where everything changed when you looked away from it, the discovery amazed her for a moment and then she simply accepted it, as she accepted that she’d somehow come to be sitting next to Dad instead of facing him across the room, as she accepted that the glass wall had opened up, and the clouds and mountains were gone again. The two of them looked out upon the back yard of the house in Versiterre, sloping greenly down through a sieve of pine trees, bracing at the rocky belt of sand, and spilling out into a brown-blue pond: the reservoir.

There was more greenery than Anna was used to. The yard looked the way it had in her childhood, before a nor’easter took out some of the tallest pines. The grass came shamelessly to the foot of the deck as though Dad had never built the patio or planted his flower garden. In present-day Versiterre, the steps would have descended to a path of smooth white stones, which wound its way among the flowers until it reached the koi pond, but there was no koi pond here, no white path, no flowers – only the smooth, verdant stage of her million childhood games.

The porch swing rocked gently beneath father and daughter, though there was no breeze. No trace remained of either office. This backyard vision seemed to have taken hold, and Anna’s senses clicked into place, her thoughts gaining traction in this strange, disjointed dream.

Dad was relaxed, one foot propped on the railing across from him, absently pushing the swing while he doodled a maze on the back of a Sudoku grid. Anna, on the other hand, could hardly sit still. Something was about to happen. Good or bad, she couldn’t say, but she felt the anticipation like a physical thing: her head whirled, her stomach fluttered, and her heart pounded brightly in the corners of her vision.

She could almost ignore the unidentifiable eyes on her back.

Then Jesse was there and they were on the grass, and Dad was telling a story. He wove his words together, pulling the threads tight with vast or precise gestures. His hand passed through the air and left an imprint of a scene, so vivid you could watch it like a movie in thin air.

The best thing about Dad’s stories was that you could never just listen. When the lonely and frightened Tobias hid in a refrigerator during an earthquake, Anna and Jesse squeezed into the toy box, and Dad rattled it around as they laughed and shrieked inside. When the earthquake hurled Tobias, fridge and all, from the high-rise apartment building, they went rolling and screaming down the hill. They shared the little boy’s wonder as he opened the fridge to find himself in Myriad. They went on to forge the famous sword of souls, and only the most perfect branch would do, stripped of all its bark and twigs. And then they wielded the sword against Jamus, Father of Nightmares, on the red rock of Mes’Ella, the Table of the Stars, and drove him to the brink.

In the end, they all got a turn to be Jamus, because Jamus got thrown off the dock into the cool brown water.

That was how it had always gone, and that was the overall impression Anna got from what happened after Jesse arrived. But it was all jumbled up, punctuated by Dad’s laughing face. Anna’s face hit the grass and it was green and pungent, and she was rolling. There was the house behind her, the gray-yellow sky above, Jesse ahead of her, and Dad running to keep up and laughing at the same time. Anna laughed, too, and got a mouthful of grass. The house, the sky, Dad, and Jesse spiraled past more quickly this time.

Somehow Dad got ahead. At the bottom of the hill, he caught her and yanked her up with such force that she flew into the air over his head and hovered there for a second. Now they both laughed, and he held out his arms and Anna fell into them.

She could just see Jesse through the bare brown tangle of dead and dying underbrush, already looking for a branch. But she was in no hurry. This was what she’d been looking for – the comfort and happiness of having Dad back – not some silly stick.

“Where did you go, Dad?” Anna’s child-voice spoke the questions of her grown-up mind. “And why didn’t you tell us? If it was something here, I could have helped.”

Dad didn’t answer.

“Dad?”

Frowning, she drew back—

—then wrestled herself free with horror. The dream had gone sideways. Dad wasn’t Dad anymore. In his place stood a human-shaped pillar of black goo, which clung to her as she thrashed away. The arms that had held her so warm and secure just moments ago now became tendrils of slime and oozed to the ground. Where they fell, the grass died and the dirt turned black. Anna wiped some free from her arms; her skin was stained underneath.

It looked like “they” had found her.

Anna could taste the soured dream like a thick coating of burnt espresso and gasoline on her tongue. Sun, it had been years since she’d tasted that! Little boggarts, sure, but one this big and powerful – how had the nightmare caught her so unaware?

The shape that had been Dad was dissolving quickly and spreading silently across the lawn. It almost would have been better if the boggart had made some sort of wet or viscous sound, she thought. The silence made it impossible to track or identify, and that made it all the more frightening.

Anna had the wild notion that she would be safe if she could just get to the water, but the boggart had already claimed her ankles and she could only run in slow motion. Ropes of the stuff still clung to her arms and seemed to pull her back toward the thing that wasn’t Dad.

“Jesse, the sword!” she tried to scream – as if a stick could have any effect against this sentient muck. But it was as if the slime had filled her lungs, too, and no sound came out. Where was Jesse, anyway? Had the slime swallowed him? Surely he wouldn’t have left her alone on purpose at a time like this…

Struggling toward the dock, Anna considered the scene around her and what she might use as a weapon against the ravenous goo beast. Of the nine types of magic, light was easiest for her; she didn’t even need her voice for that. She reached for the sun, but its diffuse yellow light was too soupy to grasp, and her movements too sluggish to work any Songs with it anyway. Where was Jesse? As the water whiz, maybe he could bring the shoreline to her; she wasn’t making any headway like this.

There was only one thing left to do: she would have to Wrench awake.

Anna shut her eyes, seized every muscle in her body till the lactic acid pumped, and screamed soundlessly until her throat was raw: “I will wake up. I will wake up. I WILL WAKE UP. I WILL