Keeper of Dreams (28 page)

“You’ll have a better chance there than here. Can you hold my hand?”

“I can’t hold anything,” she said.

But when he held out his hand to her, she took it. And he felt her hand in his. He could hold on to her. Better than he could hold on to the branches, because she wasn’t so hard and unyielding; he didn’t feel as if his body would tear itself apart if he held her too tightly. “Stay with me,” he said. “We’ll try to get closer to the mouth of the worm. If
he
goes this way, the mouth has got to be down here, too.”

The faster they moved, the more control they had, or so it felt. Their feet touched the ground very lightly, but they didn’t bounce up and into the air. With the wind coming from their right side, they had to keep correcting in order to move in the direction they intended. But soon enough they emerged from the trees and there was a town.

It looked vaguely oriental, mostly because of the shape of the roofs on the nearest houses. The colors of the walls had once been garish, but they were faded, the paint peeling. But there wasn’t time to study the architecture. People were milling around in the streets, jabbering at each other. They didn’t speak a language Todd had ever heard before. How could they? Only Eggo had had a chance to learn English. There’d be no talking with these people. No asking them for directions.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. Because now he could see what they were all excited about. The street was covered with a drift of water. Not puddles, a drift—thicker than a mist or a fog, but not rushing anywhere, just hovering.

It was the trickle of water they had sent through the hose when they first tested it up the worm’s anus. Only here, it was a lot of water.

Which meant that the original position of the worm’s mouth wasn’t far from here.

“Come on,” he said to Mom, dragging her around the crowd.

“Wait,” she said. “It’s water from
our
world, isn’t it? Todd, I’m so thirsty.”

He couldn’t force her to stay with him, though he thought it was a bad idea for her to head toward the people. He needn’t have worried, though. They were apparently so freaked out by the water that it made them jumpy. When Mom started drifting through the crowd, they parted for her, and some of them screamed and ran away. She knelt in the pool of water and drank.

Todd could watch her gain solidity as she did. Apparently the lack of water had desiccated her, faded her. Now she was more solid, and more naked, but still it didn’t bother him. It was like seeing a baby naked. There was a job to do, no time to worry about embarrassment.

He drifted toward her; but the moment he touched the water, it felt familiar and real—and cold and wet. He slogged through the water to
where she knelt. “Let’s go now, Mom, before they start figuring out just how solid we aren’t.”

She drank just a little more, then took his hand. They made better progress now that she could find a little better purchase for her feet, more strength in her legs. At the same time, being more solid made her more vulnerable to the wind.

They found the source of the water—a house. The people had broken down the door, apparently to find out what was causing the mini-flood, or perhaps to make sure no one was inside, drowning.

Todd also saw that the water trailed off in another direction. “When we moved it, the hose stayed with it for a few steps. I think the new location must be in that direction.”

He pulled her along. She stopped and drank again. “I need that water,” she said. “Don’t leave it behind.”

“There’s plenty of water where we’re going,” he said.

“But you don’t
know
where we’re going. Just . . . this direction.”

“Mom, we only took a few steps before the hose fell out, and here it’s hundreds of yards. So the final location could be a mile farther on. We’ve got to keep moving.”

A crowd of people, many of them children, were following them as they drifted out of the water and on up the streets. Todd tried to figure what a straight line would be, extending in the direction that the thick low fog had trailed off, but the streets weren’t cooperating. He kept trying to double back to get in the line, but nothing led in the right direction.

Until finally they reached a street with a high fence enclosing a park, with green lawns and stately trees. He wasn’t sure exactly where the line from the hosewater would have intersected with the park, but he knew it was bound to reach it somewhere. Quite possibly the real flood, when it came, would pour out in this park, which would make it much easier to see.

As if on command, there was a loud crashing sound not very far off, and when Todd looked in that direction, he saw a wall of water rushing toward them—toward the whole length of the fence.

There was no point in trying to face it head-on. They had to get around the flood, behind it. And for now, the only way to do that without having to slog through water was to get above it.

He led his mother up into one of the trees. But in this wide-open park, they couldn’t climb hand over hand, tree to tree. There were wide gaps, and all they could do was leap, hoping they wouldn’t get taken by the wind and drift away.

It was slow going, but they made steady progress, and Todd did a fair job of estimating how the breeze would influence their flight. It was kind of exhilarating, to leap out into the air and drift only slowly downward, over the rushing water.

And as they moved around the water, they found that it was flowing out of a huge house. The crashing sound had been the stone front wall of the house giving way, crumbling from the pressure of the thick fog. Which seemed absurd. Except that the water would be coming so hard and fast out of the hose on this end that it wasn’t
water
pressure that knocked down the wall, it was the explosive force of air pressure.

He heard shouting behind him, which wasn’t a surprise; but it was growing closer, which was. Most of the people had fled from the flood when they saw it coming at them through the wrought-iron fence. But now there was someone plunging ahead through the water. It was easier for him than it would have been for Todd or Mom—the water was only fog to him, though it was a very thick one.

It was Eggo. And he was aiming something at them.

A gun. He had a gun.

Eggo fired. The bullet passed through Todd. He felt it, but not as pain. More like a belch, a rumbling. But that didn’t mean the damage wasn’t real.

“Why are you doing this!” shouted Todd.

He could see that Eggo didn’t hear him. “Keep going toward that house, Mother.” He let go of her hand. “Go! Don’t make all this a wasted effort!”

She went, looking at him once in anguish but plunging ahead.

Todd headed straight toward Eggo, who was reloading the thing. It was a muzzle-loader. He only had a musket. Thank heaven he hadn’t figured out how to make an AK-47.

“Don’t be stupid!” shouted Todd. “Stop it!”

Now the elf heard him. “No!” he shouted. “You wrecked everything!”

“The sooner we get back home, the sooner this flood will stop!”

“I don’t care!” shouted Eggo. “That’s the king’s house, you fool! You destroyed the king’s house!”

“And you can save it by driving us out of here! Let us go, and be the hero who ended the flood!”

Eggo’s gun was loaded and he was pointing it right at Todd, who was close enough now that he thought this time it would probably hurt.

But Eggo didn’t fire the thing. “All right!” he said. “Go! I’ll shoot
past
you. Just get out of here. And act like you’re afraid of me!”

“I won’t be acting,” murmured Todd.

But he couldn’t change direction in midair, and he knew if he once got into that water, he’d never be able to take off again.

“Give me a push!” he shouted at Eggo.

Eggo ran at him and held up the barrel of his musket. Todd grabbed it, barely clung to it with his attenuated fingers, and then hung on for dear life as the elf swung him and threw him toward the palace, where Mom was just reaching the huge gap through which water was flowing.

Soon they were inside, grabbing sconces and chandeliers and furniture to keep them moving forward through the air over the flood. And finally they found it, the place where a huge, thick hose-end was spewing out an incredible volume of icy, jet-speed water. Todd made the mistake of being in the path of the blast and it felt like it had broken half his ribs. He dropped down into the water. Mom screamed and pulled herself down to help him, which saved
her
from getting blasted by another whip-like pass from the hose.

“We’ve got to get under it,” he said. “Look for where the hose comes out of nothing. We have to climb the hose into the worm’s mouth!”

Now it was Mom’s turn to drag Todd, through the water, barely raising their heads above the surface to breathe. Finally they got behind the hose-end, and even though it was whipping around, the base of it, the place where it came out of nowhere, was fairly solidly in place.

The hose was exactly the right size for Todd to grip it. “You first!” he shouted to Mom. “Climb up the hose! When you get to the end, tell them to turn it off, but don’t pull it out till I climb down after you!”

Mom gripped the house and when her hand inched up past the place
where the hose disappeared, it also vanished. “Keep climbing,” Todd urged her. “Don’t stop no matter what you see. Don’t let go!”

As Mom disappeared, he turned around to avoid watching her, and to take one last look around the room. There were soldiers in flamboyantly colored uniforms gathered in the doorways, aiming arrows at him. Oh, good, he thought. They don’t have guns.

The chain saw lay discarded on the lawn. Jared stood near it, straddling the hose, watching as Dad wrestled with it like a python. He couldn’t keep it from being thrust back at him, no matter how tightly he held it against the spot where it became invisible. Suddenly a loop of it would extrude and Dad would have to grasp it again, at the new endpoint. Already several coils were on the floor. What if Mom and Todd weren’t anywhere near the point where it emerged on the other side? What if all of this was for nothing?

And then, along with a coil of hose, a hand emerged out of nothingness in the shed.

Dad let go of the hose and took the hand, dragged at it.

Mother’s head emerged from the wormhole. “Turn off the water!” she croaked. “Turn it off, but keep the hose—”

Jared was already rushing for the faucet. He turned it off, turned back to face her, and . . .

The hose lay completely on the ground, Mom tangled up in it. Nothing was poking into the worm’s anus now. How would Todd get back?

Mom and Dad were hugging while at the same time Dad was trying to wrap a shirt around her, to cover her.

“What about Todd!” Jared shouted.

“He’s coming,” said Mom. “He’s right behind me.”

“The hose is out of the worm!”

Apparently they hadn’t realized it until now. Father lunged for the hose-end, still dripping, and tried frantically to reinsert it. Mother, half-wearing the shirt now, tried to help him, but she was panting heavily and then she collapsed onto the hose.

Dad cried out and dropped the hose-end. “He’s right behind me,” Mom whispered.

Jared helped him get Mom up. She wasn’t unconscious; once Dad was holding her, she could shuffle along. Dad led her toward the house.

Jared took up the hose again and started trying to feed it through. Finding the hole was hard; pushing the hose was harder.

Until he realized: It doesn’t have to be the hose anymore. We aren’t trying to pump water anymore.

He found the rake and fed the handle of it into the gap in the air. Rigid, the handle went in much more easily—which was to say, it took all of Jared’s strength, but he could do it. He jammed the handle in all the way up to the metal of the rake and then held it there, gripping it tightly and bracing his feet against the lowest shelf on the wall of the shed.

The rake kept lunging toward him, pressing at him, shoving him backward, but he’d push it in again. It went on until he was too tired to hold it any longer and his belly and hips hurt where the rake had jabbed him, but still he held.

And then a hand came out of the hole along with a shove of the rake, and this time Jared shoved back only long enough to get out from behind the rake. It was practically shot out of the wormhole, and along with it came Todd.

Todd was bleeding all over from vicious-looking puncture wounds. “They shot me,” he said, and then he fell into unconsciousness.

Mother spent two days in the hospital, rehydrating and recovering. They pumped her with questions about what had happened, where she was for four years and four months, but she told them over and over that she couldn’t remember, that one minute she was putting Jared to bed, and the next minute she was lying out in the shed, gasping for breath, feeling as if someone had stretched her so thin that a gust of wind could blow her away.

They questioned Jared, too. And Dad. What did you see? How did you find them? Did you see who hurt your brother? And all they could say, either of them, was “Mom was just there in the shed. And after we helped her back into the house, we came out and Todd was there, too, bleeding, and we called 911.”

Because Dad had told Mom and Jared, “No lies. Tell the truth. Up to Mom going and after Mom and Todd reappeared. No explanations. No
guesses. Nothing. We don’t know anything, we don’t remember anything.”