The Iron Thorn

18 The Dark Place of Dreaming

IN MY ROOM, I changed into nightclothes and turned the flow down on the aether globes, crawling into bed with the aid of moonlight. The sheets were new and scented with lavender instead of must—Bethina must have crept in when I was in the hidden library and cleaned up after me. Another first.

I turned on my side and watched clouds skate across the moon through the crack in my drapery. Wherever Conrad was, he saw the same moon. That comforted me, a little.

It wasn’t, however, enough comfort to dull my thoughts about my Weird. I’d wished for so long not to be mad, to keep the necrovirus in my blood at bay, that what I’d found in the journal seemed like a wish fulfilled rather than a hope. A wispy, intangible thing, a theory rather than a proof. The Weird might be fiction, a product of my father’s teenage fancy as easily as it might be the solution to all of my troubles.

In spite of my mind whirling, the day of discovery proved stronger, and sleep was a fast and true partner.

The madness dream was always the same. I walked through the empty streets of Lovecraft, empty except for the creatures that skulked in the shadows of my real city, my home. Nightjars walked in broad daylight. Springheel jacks shed their human skin and let their long-jawed animal snouts scent the air. The deep-sea aquanoids that swam in the waters off Innsmouth and Nantucket stared at me with glassy, gibbous eyes.

In this Lovecraft, I was alone. In this Lovecraft, only the necrovirus shadowed my footsteps.

I’d had the dream a dozen times, a hundred times. It wasn’t even a dream, because dreams come from a person’s brain and I knew deep down that this one came directly from my madness.

It had no meaning, except that I was indeed doomed to Nerissa and Conrad’s fate. Nerissa saw things. Conrad heard voices. Neither of them had a strange magic in their blood. Just a virus. I wanted to believe my father, but what if he was just as insane?

I dreamed. And I would lie to everyone about the dream, until the day came that I couldn’t lie anymore.

As I dreamed I walked, through Uptown and down Derleth Street to the river, watching the red water bubble and hiss, the ghouls came out of their holes to urge me onward, hunched and hissing like a nightmare honor guard.

Every time I reached the riverbank in the dream—and I always reached it—I tried to throw myself in, to swim and escape or drown and forget. I was never certain which. But every time, the ghouls closed in on me before I could do it, their clammy paws holding me back and their rubbery tongues making my bare skin slick.

Only this time, when I reached the riverwalk where Dunwich Lane and the arcade separated, a figure waited for me.

I’d have recognized the tall stooped body, the raven hair straight as my own was messy, the nervous tapping of finger on leg anywhere. My throat constricted, and the ghouls around me hissed and snarled to fill the silence. They ranged in size from child to full-grown wolf, some hunched on four legs and others walking upright like men. Any of them could have torn me asunder, but they stayed far clear of the figure at the river.

I found a whisper, little more than an aquanoid’s croak from cold and terror. “Conrad?”

My brother didn’t face me, just tilted his head so that the silver sun, eternally blinded by cloud cataracts in this dark dreaming world, caught his profile.

“It’s really me, Aoife.”

I stopped a few feet from him. At my heels, the ghouls closed in, but I ignored them. They weren’t as important as this new turn the dream had taken. They could eat me in their good time, as long as I spoke to Conrad.

“Conrad, I found it. I found the witch’s alphabet like you asked me. Tell me how to—”

“Wake up, Aoife.” His voice was flat and far away, like it was coming from an aethervox rather than his throat.

“Conrad, you have to tell me what to do,” I begged. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to find you.”

“Wake up, Aoife,” Conrad repeated. “It’s not real. Wake up.”

“I know it’s the necrovirus—” I started.

“It’s not real, Aoife,” Conrad snarled. “I was wrong. Stop trying to find me.”

I drew back, feeling as if he’d slapped me. Even if this was a dream, just my brain dancing with the pathogen in my blood, it was a horrid thing for my memory to serve up.

“I left the city,” I said. “For you. Conrad, just tell me—”

“Listen.” His outline shimmered, and in the refraction of light on water Conrad was only a black shadow, a shimmering insubstantial dream figure just like everything else about this gray, dream-place Lovecraft. “I put you in terrible danger, Aoife, and I didn’t know it. I haven’t any time and all I can say is stop looking for me. Stop looking for answers. Go home and never, never look back.”

I could see through him now, through his outline and into the ruins of the foundry across the river. Above its crumbled chimneys, a flight of wild ravens swooped, their clockwork claws catching and carrying off a shandy-man for torture. The Proctors might not exist in my dream, but the price of heresy still ran strong.

“Conrad …,” I begged. I couldn’t lose him, couldn’t let him slip away again. The thought of waking up alone was more than I could bear, a weight on my chest that wouldn’t let me breathe.

“I got away, Aoife, but you won’t,” he whispered. “That’s why you have to go back. It’s not real. None of it is.…”

Conrad’s outline curled up at the edges, burned away like a piece of celluloid, and he grew transparent.

I screamed as he vanished, went to my knees and buried my face in my hands. I could endure any torment from my fellow students, any punishment of a care-parent or professor. I could take my mother’s fits and Cal’s well-meaning scorn with my head held up. But to see Conrad vanish before my eyes a second time was more than I was prepared to withstand. I broke, sorrow and rage ripping themselves from my throat. I screamed into the rank, tainted air of my dream-city until the ghouls closed in on me and smothered me with the scent of the dank underground and the caress of their drowned-corpse hands.

“Miss Aoife!”

I bolted awake, lashing out at the thing holding me down. Bethina shrieked as I cracked her in the nose. “All His gears, miss! You were screaming to wake the dead in your sleep!”

I clapped my hand over my mouth, realizing that the air-raid wailing was emanating from me. Sweat worked its way down my body and I saw that I’d kicked all of my bedding to the floor.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said, jumping up and grabbing a handkerchief from the clothespress for Bethina’s bleeding nose.

“ ’S not really your fault, miss,” she said around the cloth. “I ran to shake you awake, and that was foolish. You sounded like you was being tortured—are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, one I’d repeated innumerably. I twitched back the curtains and was startled to see it was light. I’d dreamed away the darkness, and the morning was silver and woven with mist.

“Didn’t sound fine,” Bethina said. She examined the blood-spotted handkerchief and made a face.

“I’m sorry I hit you, Bethina, really I am,” I told her, wrapping my arms around myself as my sweat went cold in the unheated room. “It was just a silly nightmare.”