Dreamfire (27 page)

Josh frowned. They'd hoped that the second layer would look into Feodor's universe, but unless he'd imagined himself living in a very foggy place, they'd run into something else entirely. Neither Josh nor Will had wanted to risk cutting through the third layer. “Try a piece of looking stone.”

The chunks of looking stone scattered across the concrete were an inch and a half thick. Will lifted one a little larger than his palm, being careful of the sharp edges; someone must have shaped the looking stone in the archroom. The surface wasn't as smooth as glass or as rough as stone but had a powdered texture like an unpolished gem. The deep-red color made Will think of rubies.

He held the piece between his hands and tried to do the same thing with it that he'd done with the looking stone at home. At first he thought nothing was happening—then a small black speck appeared out of the mist and grew larger at increasing speed. Finally it seemed to fling itself at the window, and Will knew they'd made it.

Feodor's universe was a city, a dark, rain-filled city—or rather, what was left of a city. The remaining brick buildings sat amid piles of smoke-stained rubble that had once been their neighbors. Water splashed along the black cobblestone and formed rivers that ran down the cracked and crowded streets. There were no signs of life—no people, no animals—just row after row of debris and the wreckage of a war.

Will laughed aloud. “It's perfect,” he said, and he heard Josh release a long-held breath. She lowered the gun.

But it wasn't
perfect
.

Even as they exchanged grins, astonished by themselves and each other and their Nicastro Prize–worthy creation, their view through the doorframe changed. They had been looking out over the city before, but now they seemed to zoom forward and down, into the street, across a rooftop, through a mess of shingles and wallboard, and then the image stabilized in a single room.

Josh raised the 9mm.

Although it had been bombed, enough of the room remained to identify it as a parlor or sitting room. Two walls and part of the ceiling were missing, but the rest of the room had escaped largely untouched. The surviving walls bore an ashes-of-roses paper print, and two upholstered chairs sat on opposite sides of a cracked marble-top coffee table.

A man sat in one of the chairs. A sketchpad rested in his lap, and he ran a pencil over it in long, smooth strokes. Will recognized Feodor from the photo in his computer file. He had a small, focused face with crisp lips and wide gray eyes. His hair was cut close to his skull, and he wore an old-fashioned pair of black trousers, suspenders, and a gray shirt. But this man couldn't possibly have been Feodor, because he looked no older than thirty.

The man stopped sketching midstroke. He stared directly at the window.

The smile he gave them was both coy and cold.

We didn't figure out how to close this thing,
Will realized suddenly.

That was bad. That was very bad, because the man was looking back through the doorway at them—and from the way he turned his gaze slowly from Will to Josh, Will knew he saw them.

“Hello, children. Are you looking for someone?” He spoke with a Polish accent that softened what otherwise might have been clipped words.

“He's too young,” Will told Josh, turning away from the window for a moment.

She nodded, but Feodor had heard Will speak.

“What a kind compliment,” Feodor replied. “Admittedly, my body is not as young as I would wish. But I enjoy keeping up appearances.” He placed the sketchpad on the coffee table—Will could just make out a drawing of the city's ruined skyline—and stood to face them. Although not a tall man, he filled the window. “You are very young yourselves, children. What is it you've come here for?”

“We just wanted to check on you,” Josh said.

Feodor tilted his head skeptically. “Check on me? That is not why people come here.”

Will glanced behind himself at Josh. “Why do people come here?” he asked.

“You might ask the one who sent you,” Feodor suggested.

“No one sent us,” Josh said.

“No?” Feodor tilted his head and a smile played across his lips. “Then perhaps you have outsmarted someone.”

What does that mean?
Will wondered, but he had no time to hold on to the thought, because Feodor lifted his hand and pressed it against the window.

“Stay back!” Josh barked, pointing her 9mm at him. Will backed away from the doorframe, but Feodor removed his hand with a dismissive wave, as if to say,
It is nothing.

“Apologies,” he said. “Apologies. I meant no alarm. Please forgive my curiosity.”

Will swallowed. They needed to get this interview done quickly and then figure out a way to close this window. “Are you involved with the men in trench coats?”

“Trench coats? They sound like Nazis.”

“They aren't—Hitler has been dead for seventy years,” Will said, exasperated.

“Has it been so long?” Feodor brightened again. “In that case, my appearance
is
most impressive. Would you like to see how I maintain it?”

“That's not why we—” Will began, but the image beyond the window was moving, like a movie camera that started with a slow pan, then picked up speed until it was flying down streets so quickly that all Will could see were black, gray, and white lines. When it slowed again, it framed a dim room, perhaps a basement, where Feodor stood beside a metal table with a naked corpse lying on it.

“This is my real body,” he said. The excitement of explanation animated his face. “Do you see this sheath that covers it?”

The “sheath” was a silver plastic shroud that had been wound around the body's limbs and torso, even its head. It looked to Will like Feodor had mummified himself with shrink-wrap. At the ends of the individually wrapped fingers and toes, nails had ripped through the shroud and grown so long they curled, and Feodor's face was obscured by white hair that—with no place to go—had grown down over his eyes and mouth.

“The sheath provides for all my needs—oxygen, nutrition, elimination—while maintaining my brain in a perpetual state of hibernation, which allows my dreaming mind to project an image of me that's much younger than I really am. But I'm not limited to my own image. I can project myself as anyone I want. Observe.”

Instantly, Feodor was gone, and Hitler was standing in his place. Josh swore.

Hitler lifted his arm in a Nazi salute, goose-stepped in place a few times, and then laughed wildly.

“I can even be you,” Hitler said in a thick German accent, and turned into Will.

To say that Will felt like he was looking in a mirror was an understatement. Rather, he was so convinced by the image before him that he felt suddenly afraid that he had left his own body and was looking at it from the outside.

“Or I can be a machine,” the other Will said.

Huh?
Will thought, but he thought too slowly, because a great silver funnel appeared, its tip pressed against the window. The funnel began to spin with a groan of gears, and then released a dazzling burst of white light, causing the window to shudder.

Josh fired.

The bullet hit not the window but the doorframe itself, which broke and splintered. The instant the pattern of lights went out, the window disappeared, the image of the funnel and Feodor's shrink-wrapped mummy vanishing as the entire doorway fell over. All the little mirrors broke and the lantern broke, and Will spun away, shielding his face with his arms as shards of glass and drops of burning kerosene flew through the air.

Afterward, the packing area behind the pet shop seemed quiet, despite the nun who was now using her ruler to slap the hands of a little girl wearing a dunce hat. Or maybe the gunshot had temporarily deafened Will's ears. Either way, he felt a strange calm as he looked around and saw nothing but him and Josh and a parking lot full of broken mirrors.

A garbage truck pulled up next to the Dumpster, and tentacles began slithering out from the trash. Will carefully beat out a few drops of kerosene burning on the ground near his feet.

Josh clicked the safety on the gun. She was breathing a little fast—they both were—but otherwise she looked as steady as Will had ever seen her.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Yes. Nice shooting.”

“Thanks.”

They stood there for a minute and looked at the bits of broken mirror and red glass on the concrete, while one of the garbage collectors got dragged into the Dumpster with a scream. “We probably should have figured out how to shut the window before we opened it,” Will said.

“I thought I did a rather good job of shutting it,” Josh said.

He couldn't argue with her there.

 

Twenty-two

“I say we
write it up,” Josh told Will the next day, sitting in the safe tranquility of the library again.

“If we write it up, everybody will know we did it.”

Josh knew she was still a little giddy from their success the night before. They'd actually managed to do something no one else had ever attempted, and they'd done it without another trip to the hospital. Granted, Josh could have waited to see if the window would have survived Feodor's assault instead of just blowing the whole experiment to pieces, but she didn't regret doing so. For once, she'd taken the cautious route.

Besides, she was
proud
of what they'd done. Proud that they'd thought of it, figured it out, and made it work. Proud that they'd done it together. She was even proud that Will had stuck exactly to the plan. For the first time, his presence had felt like having a partner by her side instead of a student, and she'd liked having him for a partner.

“Besides which,” Will said, “how are we going to explain how Feodor was able to see through the window? Dreamers never notice us looking through the archway.”

This oddity had caught Josh's attention as well.

“I think he sensed we were there,” Will said, not waiting for her opinion. “I think he's been in that universe for so long that he's tied into the fabric of it.”

“Yeah, but if he has such great control over that universe, why did it look like a war zone?”

“Young Ben said he never got over World War II. People re-create the circumstances of their youth all the time. He might just have been more literal than most.”

Josh made a face. She didn't get people most of the time; no way was she going to be able to understand Feodor. “I've been thinking about what he said, that someone sent us.”

“Any idea what that means?”

“None. Who would have sent us? And why?”

Josh was about to mention Feodor's strange compliment—
Then perhaps you have outsmarted someone
—when Deloise popped into the library. “Hey,” she said. “Davita just called. She wanted me to let you know that somebody found the origins of the trench-coat men—some British student film.” Deloise smiled, obviously thinking that she was delivering good news. “They're just mass-media bogeymen after all.”

“What?” Josh asked. She jumped out of her chair so fast Deloise backed up a step. “That's not possible.”

Josh had told Davita how the men had changed the Dream. Davita, of all people, should know it wasn't possible for them to be imaginary.

Deloise continued retreating into the hallway as Josh advanced on her, looking confused and like she half expected Josh to kill the messenger. “Well … gosh, that's what she said.”

Josh brushed past her sister and headed for the kitchen as fast as her knee would allow, a sense of panic driving her. She dug through her family's cluttered, ancient address book until she found Davita's phone number. While she dialed, Will watched her from the kitchen doorway.

“It's Josh,” she said as soon as Davita answered. “What's going on?”

Davita got straight to the point. “Someone found a four-minute British student film featuring the two men. It got picked up by an American late-night comedy show, and since then it's been all over the Internet.”

“So what? That just means more people have seen them in their nightmares. Did you tell my grandfather what Will and I saw?”

“I told him.”

“And?”

“He said you were foolish and disobedient and you couldn't possibly have seen one of those men change the Dream and you must have misheard the name Feodor.”

“I didn't mishear anything!” Josh felt her palms flush. She knew better than to take her grandfather's judgments personally, but his words stung all the same.

“Calm down,” Davita said, infuriatingly calm herself. “Peregrine doesn't want to start a panic, and he's right that we don't have any hard evidence that these men are more than nightmares. We're suspicious, but we don't know with any certainty.”

I know for certain,
Josh's gut whispered.
I know, I know, I know.…

“So now we all just go back into the Dream with no idea what we're up against,” she said aloud. “Great.”

“Josh, I'm working on it.”

Josh looked at Will, who had come close enough to hear Davita's voice. For a moment she considered telling Davita what she and Will had done the night before; about Feodor's war-ravaged universe, his strange youth, that comment he'd made that they couldn't explain—
Then perhaps you have outsmarted someone.

But what good would it do? She hadn't learned anything for certain that connected him to Gloves and Snitch. Davita was right: she needed hard evidence.

“Fine,” she said to Davita, and then she turned to bang her forehead against a cupboard.

*   *   *

To celebrate the solved mystery of the trench-coat men, Kerstel made an enormous dinner that included game hens, corn bread, four vegetables, and pecan pie. It also included dry red wine, which got passed around the table like a pitcher of iced tea, and Josh drank far more of it than she should have.