The Nightmare Garden

17 The Dreamer’s Domain

WHEN I STEPPED into the center of the Gate as it came to life, power humming through its every mechanism and rivet, I felt it close around me. The energy snapped off my skin and sent blue streams of electrical fire arcing toward every corner of the small room. “Don’t worry!” I shouted at Casey, who was plastered against the wall, eyes as wide as they would go. “I’ll be all right!”

Of course, I really had no idea. But I didn’t care. My Weird filled my mind, cool and deep as diving into a bottomless pool.

My vision turned into endless light as the coil arced brighter and brighter. The Gate was too powerful, no longer part of me but a tide pulling me under and replacing what made me Aoife with the unrelenting strength of the Weird.

I spread my arms, embracing the ride, feeling electricity arcing from my fingers, my hair, my eyelids. The violet light of the aether whirled around me, obscuring the ice tower, obscuring everything.

The falling sensation gripped me, and it was far stronger than the hexenring or the Gates in the Mists. This was being pulled into a vortex, not transported from place to place.

Fading, the light bleeding away into blackness, I saw the thousand skies above me again and was frozen for a moment before I felt the breath sucked from my lungs and the stars blinked out, one by one, as I passed into unconsciousness.

I felt something brush across my face. Not a hand. Something more like a feather or a cobweb, light and insubstantial as breath on my cheek.

Opening my eyes was a tremendous effort. Everything about me was heavy, most of all my thoughts, which were moving at the pace of sluggish snails.

Was I lying unconscious somewhere, or dead? Was any of this real?

It was my dream, I realized, but tethered to the painfully real, as every part of my body could attest. Above me, I saw a glass ceiling looking out onto a gentle blue sky studded with a few white clouds, delicate as spun sugar. A wind blew them apart and re-formed them into new shapes. Pink sunset blushed at the edges, and for a moment all I could do was stare through the spiderweb cracks in the glass.

“I like this time of day.”

I rolled my head to the left and saw bare white feet surrounded by the hem of a black robe, moth-eaten and nearly gray from wear.

The figure in black was no longer shadowed and covered by illusion and my own mind’s dream projections. His chest was bare, plain black trousers hidden under the robe, which he shrugged off and let fall to the floor. His hair was slicked back from his face, curls gathering at his neck. His eyes were strange, not silver like a Fae’s but white and ever-changing, like smoke under glass. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The dream figure was one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.

“You’re the first person besides me to see it in a very long time,” he said. “It happens in the winters of the worlds, the same sunset all at once, when things are desperate and broken and on the verge of cataclysm everywhere else.”

The sky darkened to blood-red, blood dried to puce, turned to crumpled blue velvet and then darkness, studded with winking stars. The figure sighed. “And it’s over.”

I swallowed. My throat was tight and sore, as if I’d been screaming for hours. My voice, when I found it, was barely a rasp. “Am I dreaming?”

“No,” the figure said sadly. “You’re awake, Aoife.”

Then I’d made it. The Gate had worked. I felt like screaming for joy and sobbing with relief all at once. “I’m … This isn’t my dream?”

“No. You’re here, in the center of all worlds, the place that is not a place,” the figure said. “The real here. The here that can no longer hide under the veil of sleep.”

“I’ve been here before, though, and thought it was real,” I said as the ticking of the great gear reached my ears. I was still unwilling to believe that after all I’d been through, I’d finally done something right. “I’ve dreamed exactly this a lot of times. Standing here and talking to you.”

“I know, but dreaming you’re here isn’t the same,” said the figure. “People dream their way here sometimes, or at least they used to. They put their images up on that glass there, make this place what they want, not what it is when you actually exist in it or when you come to it through a Gate. Except you. You could see most of what was really here in your dreams, but not all. Part of you still saw what you wanted to.” He gestured at the place. “Does it really look anything like you wanted? Now that you’re standing here with your body and not just a fragment of your mind?”

I swiveled around to take in my surroundings from my vantage on the floor. The floor itself was thick with dust and grit, and covered in the skeletons of small birds and mammals, feathers and bones decaying under my hands and feet, which I could feel with the realism of the waking world. It was as if things had been trapped behind the glass of the dome and never escaped. The throne and the great gear so prominent from my nightmares were in reality dilapidated, the seat propped up under one broken leg by thick cloth-bound books, the regalia flag tattered beyond recognition. It blew back and forth in an invisible wind. Actual cobwebs swam from the ceiling in thick banks like rain clouds. The gear itself was rusty, and it ticked with a sonorous groan each time it moved. The air had changed when I stepped through the Gate, was stale and sour and ancient against my face.

In the light, in reality, it was as far from what I’d expected as a true face was from a blurry photograph. I felt crushing disappointment. This place couldn’t help me. Nothing here was more than a poor imitation of my dreams of setting things right.

“You’re disappointed,” the figure stated, as if he could read my mind. I didn’t deny it.

He sighed, moved away from me, and sat at an ornate dining table hidden in a shadowed corner, large enough to seat twenty. A tarnished candelabra was at his elbow, candle wax flowing across the surface. The single chair wobbled under even his slight weight. “It’s been unseen for a long time,” he said. “I used to have a place across every world, even if it was only in people’s dreams. But when they put gates and guards at all the entrances and exits …” He sighed, his breath kicking up some dust from the tabletop. “Those things are broken now. The dreams have stopped coming.”

I flashed on Dean. I sleep tight beside you, princess. Valentina, Cal, my father and even Draven had all made mention that they hadn’t been dreaming.

How could I not have seen it? The broken Gates were fracturing not just all the physical Lands, but the metaphysical one as well. This dream place was drying up. That fact left me with one burning question.

“Why do I still have dreams?”

The figure shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious. “You’re not dreaming when you visit me. You’re touching something you can’t quite grasp. Like the man who built that contraption you used to get here, you can lift the veil, the perceptions put in place by space-time, and you can see the worlds as I see them from here. It’s your gift, both of you.”

“Tesla? Tesla came here?” My voice came out a high squeak, and I felt an impending sense of panic of the worst kind. This was all wrong. My dreams were dreams. Reality was reality. Without that, I might as well be mad.

The figure nodded. “Nikola was a troubled man. A man who thought he was going insane, until his science helped him realize he wasn’t having visions. He had a gift, and where some controlled fire or water or air, he controlled reality itself. His gift was trying to show him what he could do, but unfortunately he never believed that what he’d done was a worthy thing. When he realized that he could use his gift to build those Gates, he thought he’d brought about the end of the world.”

He stood up again as I stared at him slack-jawed, trying to process what he’d just told me, and moved to stand in front of the great gear. The skies outside changed in time with its agonized, rusty ticking, becoming stormy and dark. Lightning arced from place to place, and the ground under my feet vibrated with thunder. I wasn’t scared of what was outside, but I was terrified at the implications of this man’s words.

“He didn’t destroy the world,” I said in a whisper. “The Storm made it a bad place. A hard place. But the Iron Land still exists.” This couldn’t be true. My Weird was machines. It was iron, steam, aether. Gears and wheels, turning in time with my mind.

My Weird was not this, not this power to rend reality. I’d already done enough of that.

But how else to explain how I’d come here? I hadn’t fixed the Gate with my Weird—it hadn’t been broken to begin with. It had come to life at my very presence. Almost as if it had been waiting for me.

I started shaking, and knotted my hands together to hide it. Fixing the Gate in the Bone Sepulchre hadn’t hurt. Not one bit. My Weird usually crushed my brain, compressed and remade it, every time I tried to use it, but this time … this had felt right. I had to consider that the man from my dreams could be right. Maybe machines weren’t my Weird. Maybe manipulating machines was just a side effect. Maybe, really, Tesla and I were the machines, made of bone and blood and magic rather than iron. Machines able to open the doorways between worlds with our thoughts.

It wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’d heard of since I’d left Lovecraft. I looked back at the dream figure. “Tesla wasn’t afraid of the Gates,” I said. “He made them for a reason—he made them to keep people safe. Maybe what grew up around them was bad, the Fae and all the creatures creeping into the Iron Land, but …” I trailed off, frustrated and confused by the whole conversation. I’d come here to make things better and I’d only found more questions.

“It’s not the Gates Tesla was afraid of,” the figure said. “He was afraid of them.” He pointed out at the storm, which billowed across all the skies now, blanketing us in iron-gray violence and bright white lightning. Rain began, spattering patterns across the glass, and every time the lightning flashed, I caught a glimpse of things with blind eyes and long tentacles, writhing and racing and fighting among the clouds, growing closer and closer with every heartbeat, every boom of thunder. I drew back, even though, exposed inside a glass dome, there was nowhere to hide.

“What are they?” I whispered, feeling my shoulder begin to throb with a vengeance the closer the great creatures came. “Who are you?”

“I’m nothing,” the figure said. “I’m everything. Depends on how you look at dreams.” He looked back at me, silhouetted in the lightning. His face was handsome, not young and not old, taut skin over sharp bones, a hawkish nose and those blind eyes that nevertheless stabbed me with a visceral feeling of vulnerability when he turned them on me.

“I think dreams can be real,” I said softly. “In part.”

“Then if I’m real, and they’re real, at least in part, I’m the one who looks after them,” he said. “The king, the keeper, the weaver and the destroyer. There are a lot of names that spin out all across the skies. Some say I’m a trickster and some that I’m a demon. Depends on who you ask.”

“What should I call you?” I said, unable to stare at the skies outside any longer without giving in to the urge to scream. “You know my name. I need yours.” Names had a lot of power, at least with the sort of people I dealt with. It would make me feel a tiny bit more in control if I could name the dream figure, give the darkness substance.

“I don’t have one. I’m just a shadow,” he said. “A shape on your wall, when a little light comes under your door at night. You can call me whatever you like.”

“You remind me of the crows,” I said. “They followed me from place to place, back home. My friend Dean says they’re clever watchers. They see everything. Like you.”

“They’re psychopomps,” said the figure, the same thing Dean had said to me when I’d been frightened of the crows following me in Arkham. “Not agents of mine.” When I cocked my head in confusion, he elaborated. “Psychopomps are the heralds of the dead. They go to and from the Deadlands with souls that have escaped the notice of both Death and the living.” He tilted his face up and frowned in concern as raindrops worked their way through the cracked glass at the apex of the dome. I watched as well, but the glass appeared to hold, so I looked away rather than watch the writhing black shadows beyond.

“I’ll take that name you want to give me,” the figure said. “It’s as good as any.”

“Crow,” I agreed. “You’re bad tempered and squawk like one, anyway.”

Above us, again the great figures clashed and retreated. This storm wasn’t moving, despite the rapid pace at which everything moved here, the endless sunsets, sunrises, storms and clear skies of all the worlds that spun around this place. The thunderheads, and the shadows, were staying still, right overhead. It wasn’t normal, and I looked at the dream figure for confirmation. Crow rubbed his left hand over his right, and I noticed for the first time, in the stark relief of the lightning, that a network of white scars, whiter than the dead-colored skin underneath, webbed his entire body, his face and his eyelids, up to his hairline and down to his fingernails.

“What are they?” I repeated, and pointed upward. I had an idea, but it seemed so fantastical. I’d never believed in the stories of great alien beings who drifted endlessly through space. Worshipped by some, they were forecasted to return someday and restore the wisdom of the cosmos.

I was part Fae, and even I could recognize a fairy tale when I heard one.

“You know what they are,” Crow said, and my heart dropped. He continued, “They travel through space and time, from star to star. They create, they send magic and madness and the spark of invention into the primitive beings they encounter.” He sighed. “But sometimes, they also devour. They can be the beginning of a golden age or the end of everything.” He touched one of the great spiked gears protruding from the floor. The nightmare clock, in the flesh. “The power of my gears keeps them close to me, because I’m protected. I keep them occupied and prevent them from visiting one world too often. There’s always the possibility that it will be a visit of destruction. But you see their children everywhere, in what you call the Iron Land. You have ghouls and things like the Erlkin, yes, but some of those abominations that feed on your flesh don’t come from Thorn and they don’t come from the Erlkin. They creep and crawl and pretend all they’re interested in is food, and little by little they’re paving the way for a return visit from those creatures out there beyond the glass. They journeyed to your world once before, left behind the sort of magic in the human blood that leads to things like the Gates, but this time, this return, I couldn’t guess their motives.”

Crow turned and looked at me full on, and even though his eyes lacked pupils his stare was penetrating. “It takes millions of years for a dead star to send its last light across the cosmos. It’ll take them millions of years to devour the universe, but I believe they’ll do it eventually, Aoife. They came from another place, another wheel and spoke of a world much like ours, where they’ve done the same.” He rubbed his scars harder, the white lines standing out like brands and gradually fading to pink under his nails, as if he were having a reaction to the very idea of the creatures outside.

“Those …” My mouth dropped open, and the confirmation of my fears made me sick and dizzy all over again. “Those are the Great Old Ones. They’re real.”

“Perhaps the realest things in the universe,” said Crow. “And the most unreal as well. They bring a vortex of madness and creation with them, and to power it, they expend enormous energy. So they are always hungry.”

He came to me and offered his hand. I took it with trepidation and then gasped when he yanked me against him. His chest was hard, unyielding as granite. He was warm, though. I was surprised—I expected that a being such as him would be not warm, but cold as outer space. Crow didn’t look as if he should have any blood in him at all, but I stopped struggling when I felt the warmth of his skin. It calmed me, and I had the strangest urge to cling to him.

“I know why you’re here,” he said, lips nearly against my ear. It didn’t feel like a violation, though—it felt as if he was trying to keep me safe. “The same reason Nikola came.” Crow grabbed the back of my neck with his other hand and drew us together so that we shared breath. “You both came here because you both lost something,” he whispered. “And you’re going to use the clock to turn it back and make it right. Nikola tried to turn it back to the time when he was young, before he ever conceived of bending reality to his whim. Before the Gates were even a spark. To avoid the Storm, and all the destruction it caused. I think you’re here for very similar reasons.”

“I have to use it,” I whispered back. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need it, Crow.” I felt tears slip down my cheeks, warm and wet and alive. “I need it,” I repeated, unable to articulate all the reasons why over my sobbing.

“The clock is what keeps them at bay,” said Crow, turning me to face the writhing shapes outside the glass. “The gears hold power that even they covet, and they’re wise creatures. They fear it a little too. Only the clock. Nothing else.” He let go of me. “That’s how it is.”

“But you don’t know,” I told him. “They could be coming not to devour. You said it yourself.” The Great Old Ones could create as easily as destroy, according to Crow. Who was he to decide that they were only on a mission to end the Iron world?

Crow shook his head, his features less sad now than set, with no way for me to change his mind. “I can’t take that chance, do you understand? I’m not the power I once was, Aoife. Humans don’t believe in dreams as anything but fancies, Fae think they are invincible, and the Erlkin dream only of machines, clanking and steaming and tearing this place apart. Nobody fears me, and nobody believes I truly exist.”

He pressed his forehead against the glass, so close to the things outside that I swore he could have embraced them. I’d never given the Old Ones more than a passing thought. In their way, they were placebos for the sort of people who bought wholeheartedly into Proctor propaganda. Great alien beings, bringers of wisdom and knowledge.

Except the Proctors were wrong. Because Crow was afraid of these vast beings. In my dreams I would have thought nothing could scare Crow. He was ancient, after all. The king of dreams.

I didn’t know how I felt. There was a chance the Old Ones could break free, but there was also a chance they didn’t care about our world at all. Crow was too scared to see clearly, that much was plain. I had to make the choice this time. No Tremaine whispering in my ear, no Draven holding me hostage.

My choice, I realized as I stood at the center of the dome, was the same as it had always been. No choice at all. I had to set right what I’d done. I had to use the clock.

“I need the clock, Crow,” I repeated. “I have to go back and stop myself, find my mother and come back. I have to.”

Crow shook his head, and my panic redoubled. Not now, not when I was so close. “Please,” I whispered. “If I don’t, the world won’t ever recover. It’ll be worse than the Storm.”

“This is all I have left,” Crow muttered. “Protecting the rest of the lands from the Old Ones is all I have. But as long as I exist, as long as the gear turns, this is what I must do.”

I felt fresh hot tears sprout in my eyes. “I’m not like you, Crow. All I have is my family, and Dean, and I need them to be all right.” I made myself move despite my fear of the Old Ones. I went to Crow at the glass and reached out. I touched the very tips of my fingers to his skin. The scars were ridged and warm, and I fought the urge to run my hand over them.

“You’re not special,” he said. “You or Nikola. You’re just a girl, and he was a troubled young man who made terrible mistakes. What gives you the right to unleash the Old Ones just to put right a single error?”

His words were a hammer blow, but I didn’t let myself crumble. “I did something really horrible,” I told him. “But if you’re so worried about protecting the worlds, well—there won’t be a world much longer, not if I don’t stop what I set in motion.”

What I said next would likely decide whether I ever got to touch the nightmare clock or Crow simply shut me out of his domain, as everyone else in the world was slowly closing off from their dreams. “You can’t hold them back, Crow.” I looked up at the things outside, watched their tentacles and their great cloudy eyes rove from sky to sky, world to world, hungry. “They know it too,” I said. “They know you’re weakening every night, every hour, that human and Fae and Erlkin don’t dream. Every minute that the Gates are broken, keeping your dreams from reaching anyone except me.”

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for Crow to close the space between us, grab me by the throat and slam the back of my head into the glass hard enough to make tiny cracks. I gasped in pain, my vision blurring and my skull ringing.

“I walked the spheres with gods, you speck of flesh,” Crow growled, his tone no longer soft and measured. “And you call me weak?”

“That’s what I said,” I agreed. “Your only chance is to let me use the clock.”

Crow glared down at me. His features really were beautiful, in the way that something terrible is also beautiful—a silver-plated straight razor, a fireball, or the trapped fury of aether under glass.

“You can’t be happy here,” I continued. “Cut off. Nobody dreaming. It’ll only get worse.”

A small shudder passed through Crow’s narrow shoulders. It could have just been wind, but inside the dome, it was as still as a calm afternoon in midsummer, so I knew I was getting somewhere. “Let me turn it back,” I said. “Or I’ll use my Weird to do it without you.” I could already feel the clock in my mind, as if it had always been there. Maybe it had—I’d touched it in my dreams and it had waited patiently in my subconscious until my brain caught up with what my dreams had always known. Of course, I had no idea if I could manipulate it. That wasn’t my gift, after all. But I had to try.

Crow gave a startled laugh. “Your Weird? You mean the magic trick your blood trots out when your higher brain can’t take it another second and asks the lizard to jump in the driver’s seat? You can’t use that on this. This isn’t a machine. And your Weird is so much more than that. Your mind would break from the strain.”

“Watch me,” I snapped, and pushed. It felt natural, no pain, no struggle and not even any pressure in my skull. I married my mind with the nightmare clock so perfectly it might have been made of flesh, or I of iron.

But nothing happened. The gear ticked on, the storm continued to rumble, and outside the bodies of the Great Old Ones pressed ever closer.

I pushed harder, because it was easy now, and then all at once I was felled by the worst pain I had ever known. Worse than when I’d destroyed the Engine. Worse than when I’d plunged into the icy Erebus River afterward. It was so bad I couldn’t even think of it in terms of my own body; the pain was a separate and distinct being, sharing my skin and filling me to the brim with agony, until it overflowed into a scream.

Flashes. Light. Pictures. A dizzy lanternreel on a torn screen, projecting from the Edison box, out of focus and saturated with blood colors.

My father on his knees, a dark head cradled in his lap. My mother standing in front of great iron walls that run on and on. Cal halfway between a ghoul and a boy, the seam stitched with wire, listening to faraway screams while smoke roils around him.

Crow grabbed me and shook me, and I let go of the clock. The pain stopped, leaving me trembling and soaked in freezing sweat. I felt as if I wanted to throw up, but none of my muscles would respond to do anything more than spasmodically tremble. I had been electrified, and was now burned.

“I warned you,” he said, without a modicum of sympathy. “If you were really good with machines, you’d have me over a barrel, but you’re not. That’s not where your true gift lies.”

He had told me, and I should have listened. Crossing worlds didn’t hurt, but the nightmare clock wasn’t responding to me. Machines had always been a fight, but coming here had felt natural. “I guess …,” I began, but talking hurt. I tried again. “I guess you’ll just have to kill me to stop me, then. Because otherwise I’m not going to stop.”

“I told you,” Crow sighed, using the hem of his robe to blot the blood from my face. “Sacrificing yourself won’t change what you did. You have a gift. You owe it to yourself to try rather than throw yourself on your sword.”

I tried to sit up, but I was too spent, too wrung out. I wanted to scream in frustration. “But I destroyed the Engine,” I croaked.

Crow sat back on his heels. “You can cross worlds, Aoife. Without a Gate, without anything but your own mind. Explain to me how you can have such a gift, believe in it and not believe you can fix this?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him. I just lay there watching the top of the dome, the Old Ones growing larger and closer.

“Machinery and magic in the same mind.” Crow shook his head. “World crossing, right there.” He reached out and ran his thumb along my cheekbone, through the blood. “Amazing. Humans can still surprise me.”

I curled up in a ball, away from him. I wanted to be smaller and smaller, until I disappeared. Having a Weird that Draven and Tremaine would kill for was bad enough. If they, or the Brotherhood, knew what I could truly do, create Gates out of thin air, I’d never be safe again. They would all converge, fight over who got to use me or murder me. Depending on their outlook, I was a savior or a destroyer.

I would never be free, and neither would anyone I cared about.

“I have to …” I sat up, even though it hurt almost as much as trying to manipulate the nightmare clock. “I have to put things right.”

Crow worried his lip and looked at me. His teeth were small and square, not pointed like the ones I’d come to associate with most inhuman things. “I can’t let you,” he said. “The Old Ones—”

“I’ll put them back.” I grabbed his arm and made it fruitless for him to pull away. His forearms, on the insides, were snaked with black marks, ink tracing the scars to form words, though they were in a language I couldn’t decipher. I held on. “You told me I can do it. I can cross worlds. I can make them stop ever coming to you again. I can put them back where they belong, out in the cold, empty space where they can never escape.”

“Nobody knows what I go through, keeping them from the rest of the worlds,” Crow said, looking up. “When they talk, it’s in riddles. To hear their voices would melt your eyes out of their sockets.”

“Then you’ll have to tell me what to do,” I said, holding on to him as he stood up, falling against his hard chest. The warmth of his skin made my cheek flush.

“I don’t think you understand what you’re willing to do,” Crow said. “I don’t think you can.”

“I think you want things to be set right as badly as I do,” I said. “I think you’re scared of those things.”

“If you fail,” Crow said, “you’re going to set them loose. On everything. The Gates and what’s happening to the Iron Land will be a tiny dot of misery on history’s time line of pain if they’re allowed.”

“That’s a chance I’ll take,” I said. I could do it. I had to. In the back of my mind, I recognized the same sort of desperation that made people in Lovecraft do insane, suicidal things like hurl firebombs at Ravenhouse and attack Proctors in gangs, dragging them off to be hanged from old machine skeletons in the Rustworks.

And I didn’t care. I would get what I needed from Crow.

“Even if I have faith you can deliver on your promise,” Crow told me, “you would have to face the clock. And it’s not a clock, not really. It’s a vessel holding in the past and the future and the dreams that tie them together.” He held up his palm, bloody from where he’d touched me. “That’s what it is, when you look into the heart of it. The nightmares of everyone you love. A machine made of bad dreams that you must walk through to use the clock. Nobody can weather that storm, I don’t think. Not Tesla. Not even you.”

I pressed my palm against his, taking the blood back onto my own skin. “I can,” I said. I didn’t even bother to hope Crow couldn’t see the lie. He had known what I’d say before the words left my tongue. But at last, to the greatest relief I’d ever felt, he pretended to believe me, and folded his fingers over mine.

“Then so be it.”