The Dreamwalker's Guild

"Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky," said the girl, "and while they danced the bees hummed, and the nightingales sang, and together they produced a sweet symphony of the most beautiful kind."

And in a voice that was much less grand, she said, "I go on about the choreography of their dance after that. Twirls and swirls and—oh goodness, you're making a face. Is it the imagery? It must be the imagery. Too fluffy for your liking? Bless. So then I describe their dance a bit more, using some words I found in the dictionary, and then I draw it to a close, and I use a semicolon, which I'm rather excited about: They move together homogeneously, stepping side by side; an empyrean waltz above the world, and only when the sun pokes her golden face over the pastel hills do they stop, the sky composing itself, the clouds scuttling abashedly away."

She looked up the from the notebook and smiled brightly, all freckles and dark curly hair, and it was only then that Theo saw her eyes—one deep brown, the other icy blue—her gaze piercing him in such a way that he found himself quite speechless.

"So what do you think?" she asked.

He looked down at his boots. "Good," he managed. "It's good."

She laughed gently and closed her notebook. "If you don't like it, just say so. I don't mind. I'm trying to get better."

A cool breeze whispered through the trees around them, rustling the dry branches, smelling of earth and pine and wildflowers.

"It's a little...overwritten?" Theo ventured.

The girl nodded seriously. "Noted. Maybe I'll introduce a character early on, instead of describing the setting for the first paragraph. Probably Damian, because he's such a dear. I need to introduce someone agreeable in the beginning, someone to root for, because in the next scene there's Karius, and he's a real piece of work..."

The girl talked, and Theo fidgeted, and when she stopped talking they sat for a time in silence. He looked at the book in his hands, and then at the girl, and then at the stone of the tower beneath his feet, crumbling and mottled with lichen and moss. Our castle, his father had called it.

He watched the girl wearily, wondering why she was here, in his secret place. She had been writing when he found her, sitting on a block of stone at the top of the tower. She looked about his age, no older than fourteen. Perhaps, he thought, if he asked her politely, she would leave and never come back.

He'd just opened his mouth to say something, when suddenly she stood up and brushed the pine needles from her dress and said, rather breathlessly, "There are fairies in this world, you know."

Theo studied the patch of moss at his feet and said nothing.

“Or at least, that’s what my grandmama tells me. She says they like coming out on the summer solstice, because that’s when the human and fairy realms align, so it’s easier for them to pass through to this side." She looked at him expectantly. "Have you ever seen a fairy?"

"Um. No."

“They’re hard to find, aren’t they? The sly things. Do you believe in them? I do, but I won’t blame you if you don’t—it’s hard to find believers these days, the world being what it is.”

She fixed her gaze on him, and he looked away, at his boots, at the lattice of branches overhead; anywhere but into those unsettling eyes.

"I don't know if I believe."

She nodded thoughtfully. “That’s okay. It’s a bit sad, really, the way magic has faded over the years. My grandmama is trying to keep it alive, the idea of fairies. She tells me stories all the time, about the olden days, when fairies and humans lived together in the world. She knows things and she’s seen things, my grandmama. She’s a very wise woman.” The girl paused, and a shadow seemed to pass over her face. Theo shifted uncomfortably. For a moment they watched each other, the seconds stretching long and thin, and then she squinted up at the sun through the canopy.

“Anyhow,” she said. “I should be getting home. My grandmama will want me to finish my chores before supper.” Then she turned back to Theo and did something strange. She took a step closer to him and touched his shoulder with her index finger and whispered, “For your nightmares.”

A curious feeling spread across his body. A warm, tingling feeling, as if he were slipping into bath water. He blinked and said, “What?” but she only smiled a sad sort of smile, and took two steps back from him, holding her notebook to her chest.

“I came here to meet you, if you were wondering. I'm Lana."

"I—Theodore," said Theo, flustered. "How did you know I'd be here?"

She shrugged. "My grandmama told me."

"Do I know your grandmama?"

"She is known by everyone, and by no one. That's her business model. Anyway, do you visit this place often? I quite like writing here."

"Well. Yes."

"Then I suspect I'll see you again."

She smiled and waved and turned on her heal, stepping lightly down the stairwell set in the battlement floor until the top of her head vanished beneath the stone. For a moment Theo sat there, listening to the robin's song. Then he too stood up.

He felt tired. Too tired to read. He waited for the girl's footsteps to fade in the forest below, and then he walked down the stairwell and stepped out of the tower and followed the deer trail that wound east, toward the village and the fields.

Time passed, and the sun dipped lower in the sky. The world darkened.

He reached the village by sundown, and after two rights and a left through cobble streets he was plodding up the front steps of his townhouse. It was a normal sort of townhouse—tall and narrow and made from stone, with a rooftop of grey slate tiles. He paused outside, dread pooling in his chest, and then he stepped forward and pulled a brass key from his pocket, fitting it into the lock, pushing the door open. Everything was dark inside.

“Mum?” he said. "Are you home?”

When he flicked the light switch at the entrance nothing happened. No power again. He shuffled blindly down the hall and into the kitchen, the wooden floor creaking beneath his feet. The air stank of tobacco and mouldering fruit. He coughed into his arm.

There was a box of matches on the counter and he drew one out and struck it, lighting the candle in its holder by the sink and raising it up. The kitchen quivered in the orange glow. No smashed liquor bottles on the floor tonight, no broken crockery. Good. He walked back into the hall and climbed the staircase at the end.

She was in bed, twisted among the threadbare sheets, a bottle of gin on the side table and a cigarette smoking in her hand. She blinked in the candlelight, and when her gaze fell on him he saw that her eyes were half-closed and glassy.

"Theo?" she murmured.

"Yeah, Mum, it's me."

She brushed strands of damp hair from her forehead and took a drag from the cigarette. “How are you?”

Her voice was slurred, each word sticking to the next. She had taken pills again.

“I’m fine. When did you get home, Mum?”

“I don’t know. Some time ago.”

He took a breath and watched the candle shiver. “You promised me you would stop.”

Her gaze shifted from him to the cigarette in her hand, then to the gin on the table, and she said nothing.

Theo could feel the tears prickling his eyes now, the familiar anger flaring in his chest. He wanted to scream at her, to ask her why, why are you like this? But he did not scream. Instead he said, “Good night, Mum. I love you,” and he turned around and walked out of her room and down the hall to his own bedroom, where he blew out the candle and collapsed on his futon in the darkness.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about his father. Memories bloomed floral-bright in his mind—of the frog pond, and the motorcar, and the drives they would take down Moss-Stone Lane. Memories of the summer they’d stumbled upon the tower while hiking in the forest, climbing up the steps, pretending they were kings of the world. Now this, his father had said in a serious tone, this is a place to keep secret.

Then the diagnosis. His father in the hospital with plastic tubes running from his body, attached to a machine that kept his heart from stopping. His father in heaven. His father gone.

Theo’s mind drifted to spirits, and then to fairies, and finally to the girl named Lana with her notebook and unworldly gaze.

Do you believe in fairies?

He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. He wondered at what the girl had said—of a world where fairies and humans lived together. It seemed rather improbable now, as he lay on his futon in his bedroom, far away from the tower and the forest. It seemed rather childish.

No, he decided, fairies did not exist. The world was not a storybook. There was no purple clouds waltzing with the sky, no symphonies of bees and magpies. The world was real, and dark, and ugly.

He closed his eyes and rolled onto his side and tried to think about pleasant things, like the smell of pine and wildflowers, and how, tomorrow morning, he would hike back into the forest and hide away in the tower until the sun set below the western hills. And if the girl was there again, he would ask her to go away. Yes. That’s what he would do.

His thoughts grew quiet after that, and his mind drifted from the waking world.

***

The nightmare began as it always did. A cloaking blackness pressed around him, a perfect blackness, as if thick cloth had been tied over his eyes. He stepped blindly forward, feeling the cold of the ground beneath his bare feet, the smoothness of it, like glass. No sound in this place. Just a great stillness; a great emptiness. He wandered for a time through that world of nothing. He waited.

When the creature took form before him he wasn’t surprised, but still his heart shuddered at the sight of it. Hundreds of eyes opened above him. White, unseeing eyes, set in a writhing mass darker than darkness.

He didn’t move. It always found him in the end. He had stopped running from it long ago, because he wanted to be taken. The dream always ended when he was taken.

“Theodore.”

A faint voice. A girl’s voice.

The creature was almost on him now, and he could smell it: that stink of disinfectant and tobacco and gin. Then movement to his right. Something shoved against him, pushing him to the side, and he fell to the ground just as a tendril shot from the creature and stabbed at the place where he’d stood.

“The sword,” said the voice. “Use the sword.”

When he looked up he saw a lamp bobbing in the darkness, a lamp held by a girl with dark curly hair, her face turned from him but her voice strong and clear.

“The sword will kill it,” said Lana. She thrust the lamp toward the creature and it seemed to sag backward, shrieking and heaving, and in the shivering light Theo saw a blade on the floor by his side.

He didn’t move. Why was the girl in his dream? Why was she helping him?

“Get up, Theodore,” she said. “Get up and fight.”

He shook himself and reached for the sword and scrambled to his feet, dragging the blade along the ground. It was heavy in his hands, and he wondered, fleetingly, what would happen if he ran himself through with it.

“Now use it on the Spectre, Theodore. Swing it, like they do in cinema.”

He took a step towards the creature, but his legs were shaking uncontrollably, and he stopped and stared into those hundreds of eyes and a deep hopelessness swelled in his heart.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’ll wake when it kills me. That’s what I want.”

The girl looked at him, and her gaze was fierce. “What you’re doing is giving up, Theodore, and that’s not what you truly want.”

“How would you know? You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know enough. My grandmama told me enough. She knows things, remember?"

Then her eyes widened and she yelled, “To your left!” and Theo stepped back just as a tendril swiped at his chest.

She raised the light toward the writhing mass again, but it didn’t recoil as it had before. Instead the creature howled, a sound that throbbed and echoed through the darkness, and then it lunged.

In the moment before she vanished, the girl looked back at him. Her face flickered orange in the lamplight. Her gaze met his.

I’m sorry, said her eyes.

Black wisps dug into her skin, twisting around her, cocooning her body. Theo blinked and stumbled backward, dropping the sword, and when he looked up the girl was gone, and the lamp was gone, both swallowed by the thrashing shadows.

He shielded his face with his arms and waited for the end. A sob escaped his lips. Cold tendrils roped around his torso, around his legs and hands, and somewhere in that place of darkness he heard a rush of air, like the scream of a train whistle, and the scream formed words and said, The Mthael waits.

And then he woke.