The Radiant Road (17 page)

The Work of Dreaming

Clare thought,
There are no transitions in this place
. In my world, we have This, and then we have That. But here, they have no “and then”; it's just ThisThatThisThatThisThat, everything happening shoulder to shoulder, with no space between, like the slats of a wooden fence.

They were alone now—no leafy hall, no table—on a sandy beach, more like a California beach than an Irish one. Beside them stood a tall pile of broken branches, driftwood, and twigs of all sizes.

The light still hung between, it was still the magic hour, the blue hour, the slanting light when you can no longer see the sun, only what light scatters back to us from the sky.
Why doesn't it get darker?
wondered Clare.

The light would never change, as long as she stayed in this world. The magic hour, just before dusk—the time when the world is loveliest and strangest—is the only light the people of Timeless have. And living in an eternal magic hour, they long for midnight and noon.

But Clare did not know that yet. She only knew the breeze was salt-damp, and the low waves ran back and forth across the sand. There was something odd about the water's peaceful back-and-forth, though she couldn't quite think what it was.

“This reminds me of a beach where we went on vacation once,” she said, and then immediately yawned. She turned to hide the yawn, but not before she saw Finn's pleased expression.

“I got the idea from you,” he said, “from one of your dreams.”

“How did you . . .” She realized what he'd said. “Wait. Wait a second. You've seen my dreams?” She didn't even want people to see her poem-things, let alone her dreams. Memories of certain dreams in particular made her face go red with embarrassment, then anger. “That's, I mean, that's an
incredible
invasion of privacy.”

Finn's face fell. “I saw only those I was in, of course, I was no sneak. You've forgotten our visitings, in your dreams?”

Clare opened her mouth, closed it again. Under Finn's Cap, her brief sleep—wasn't Finn in that dream? Or his voice, at least? And not just then: in little flashes of dreams all her life, she saw a dark boy her age, who knew curious games and . . . “Was that really you? How?”

“It was,” said Finn, looking relieved. “And you will see how, soon. I brought you here that we might be safe as I teach you dreaming. Clare”—she was yawning again—“do not sleep yet. Watch.”

“Wait, but . . .” Yawn. “What's the big deal? If I fall asleep, what? What happens?”

Finn walked around his pile of branches and twigs, adjusting them, not looking at her. “Do you understand, girl, that in dreams, you come here to my world to make?”

“Yep,” said Clare. She was so glad to be out of that hall, and she felt so relaxed. She ran her hands through hair growing fat with salt air.

He shoved a thick piece of driftwood low in the pile. “And what you make here is real—real
here
. But it can't hurt you. Because in your normal life, when you dream, your body stays safe in the human world, tucked under blankets. Say in a dream you make a bridge, and you make a murderer; and the murderer chases you over the bridge, and you're well afraid, you're terrified. But when you wake, you say, ‘Oh, it was only a dream,' is that right? Because your body was safe at home, nowhere near the dream.”

“Yes,” agreed Clare, still almost-yawning.

“But if you dream while your body is here in Timeless, as yours is now, then what happens? It is not ‘only a dream,' then. It is real. The bridge you made, real. The murderer you made, real. And if you have made a knife in that murderer's coat, and he puts the knife to you—you will die a real death.”

Clare's sleepiness fled, and she stared at Finn, appalled. “I can't control what I dream. Half the time I can't even
remember
my dreams.” She thought of her dream of the theater mask, and its eyehole of broken, bloody egg, and felt a sick horror:
if that thing were real.
“Finn,” she said.

“No, no,” he said. “I will teach you. I will teach you how to open your eyes in a dream, and know that you are the maker, and make
only what you like. It will be like when you make awake in your own world, pictures and stories and such. That is a kind of dreaming-awake, and you can do that, yes?”

Clare thought of her hidden, Balor-ruined poems, and said nothing. Finn seemed not to notice.

“And so now you will learn to walk awake in dreams. Some humans can, even without teaching. With my teaching, all will be well. Now watch, then. I wish we had more time but—but I can teach you. Watch.”

He touched one branch in the pile of wood, and a little thrill of blue fire ran across it. The fire ran through the pile, and soon a blaze flickered between them.

“Watch,” said Finn a third time. And the fire between them rose up, shaped itself into a fountain of fire, like a fountain of water—in fact it did seem to be water, Clare felt she could almost reach out and touch the water—only it was red, and the spray was sparks, not droplets. The red faded—oh, she had
thought
that it was fire, but that must have been a light from underneath, of course—and now the light was blue, and it was water, it surely was, it must have always been. The clear, blue-edged water surged up high, and Clare laughed as the spray spattered her face and hair.

But the light under the fountain must have turned green, because now it almost seemed to be an enormous plant of some
kind—oh, a tree! It was a fir tree, how strange, growing straight up from the sandy beach. How could she have ever thought it was a fountain, or fire—it must have been a trick of the light. The tree towered and swayed in the wind, and she could hear the rush of the wind in the branches.

But the tree must have caught fire! Because now it was all flames, a huge, angry pillar of fluttering orange and red, towering over the beach.

(And through the flames, on the other side of the fire-tree, the fire-fountain, she saw a boy staring steady at her, sometimes; and other times, she saw a young white stag, watching her with the boy's gray eyes.)

The fire sank down, and was once again no higher than her own head.

“What happened?” said Finn, flickering from across the fire. “What happened? What did you see?”

Clare felt startled, felt confused, as if she had just been waked from a dream. “I saw, I saw that you made a fire, you lit this fire,” she began. “And then, and then I thought it was—I think it was a fountain—Finn, it
was
a fountain, look, I'm still wet.”

“And?” he said.

“And, but then it was a tree somehow, a fir tree on a beach! I could smell it, and . . .” She paused. “Did you do all that?”

“I did,” he replied. “And so must you, to practice, to know you can. Fire is easy to practice with, because fire is change, one of the few pieces of change we have in Timeless. Try.”

She stood looking into the fire. She felt absurd. “I don't even know how to start. I don't understand what you did.”

Finn's voice was anxiety wrapped in impatience. “You do know, Clare. You do it in every dream; you come here every night. You just have to know what you want, what you wish for, and use that desire to make. That's the material you make with.”

But Clare did not understand, and would not say she did.

“Try,” Finn persisted. “This is where you dream. You know how, Clare.”

Clare remembered dreaming. She remembered mornings, half awake and half still in the dream, when she felt a choice, for a moment, of whether to stay in the dream or join the day. That luxurious feeling: will I keep dreaming? what would I like to dream?

What would I like to dream?
The fire formed and re-formed, wavered, grew, shrank. She watched its colors. She looked for what she wanted there.

“Dad,” she said softly. He knelt behind the fire's billowing orange curtain. He was smiling with relief, his arms were opening to her—

“Stop,” said Finn. He grabbed her arms, shook her. “Stop. Not that. It's not safe for you yet. Where your feeling is too deep, you are laid open. The feeling makes you foolable. Do you understand? That's the trick of it. You must make what you desire. But if you are unpracticed, the desire may blind you, and you will lose control of the dream.”

Clare looked with longing as her father faded like the dream he was. She turned her face from Finn and said, “I'm sleepy now. You have to let me sleep.” The fire swelled and sank beside them.

“Not yet,” said Finn. “Here: I will fetch you a drink that will help you keep awake. Stay awake till I come back.”

Easy for someone who has never slept to say “stay awake.” But Finn thought sleeping was like eating—you might be hungry, but you could still refuse to eat. He did not understand sleep's sneak-thief ways.
I'm only closing my eyes one second
, thought Clare as Finn disappeared behind the dunes.

But it had been a long, exhausting day, after a long, sleepless night. And maybe, too, part of Clare wanted to practice dream-making alone, in private, the only way she had ever dreamed or made. So in that split second when she still had a choice, she let the river of sleep carry her away.

In her dream, Clare walked through a bombed city at dusk, amid its rubble and blackened, smoking walls. In the distance, sirens wailed and wailed, around and around and around.

Picking her way through smoldering debris, she almost stepped on a small hand thrust out from beneath a concrete block—a child's hand, blue and motionless. She bent to touch the hand. But the wreckage was so recent, the building so freshly fallen, that the concrete burned her wrist, and she pulled back with a cry.

Across the street, from the skeleton of an office building, came a hollow animal groan, followed by the snuffling breath familiar to her from nightmares. Clare hurried on. A distant, piercing scream met the still-wailing siren and made a kind of harmony with it.

Clare began to run. She remembered now: she was looking for someone, someone lost, her father? Not her father, but someone, she would know when she found them, and she had to find them, make sure they were all right.

She rounded the corner of a half-fallen building and stopped. A half block away stood a tall, thin man in a tall black hat, face obscured by the dusk. In his cupped hands, he held a red bird, a cardinal. As you can in dreams, Clare saw the bird far away and close up at the same time. It trembled in the man's yellowish hands.

Somehow, of all the terrible things Clare had seen and heard in this city, this man holding a red bird was the worst, the most
unbearable. She screamed a scream of pure terror, straight from her bowels—thinking, as she did:
oh yes, I see now, that was
me
screaming, my scream that made a harmony with the siren, just like it's doing now
.

The dark figure looked up and smiled an unnaturally wide and wolfish smile. A red eye patch creased his jaundiced skin. He held the red bird out toward Clare, as if urging her to look closer.

She saw that his fingers were as red as the bird, were dripping with a dark red that fell in long thick liquid strands and pooled on the ground at his feet.

What he held was not a bird at all, but a bloody and beating heart.

Clare's hand flew to her chest. Her heart, her heart. Was it there? She couldn't feel it—could she? Was that a
hollow
sound, inside her ribs? She pounded her own chest frantically, but it was no good, there was nothing there, and she fell to her knees, feeling something desperately important ebb away from her.

But somehow the siren was forming words now, drowning out everything else. The wailing, circling siren song said one thing:
Clare! This is a dream! You have control! Take control!

She caught her breath.
I have control.
She spoke.
“
It's my dream, and I say . . . I say it's a bird. It's a bird, I make it a bird. It has to be a bird. Drop that bird!” she shouted, as she had once heard a woman shout to a dog. “Put it down! Now! Drop it!”