Matthew slammed the door behind them.
Outside, it was beautiful; it was always beautiful. The Barns was located deep in the foothills of western Virginia, hidden in a protected fold of hill and valley beneath the watchful eye of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Matthew had grown up in the old white farmhouse. He’d rambled over these fields. He had played in the various barns and outbuildings that spread right up to the trees that surrounded the property.
Now the cold mist rose up from the colorless fields and got caught in the dark red-brown lingering leaves of the surrounding oaks. The blue sky soared high overhead. White streaky clouds glowed with morning pink, just like the white-painted outbuildings down below.
It was really nice.
He guessed.
For several minutes he and Declan walked in silence down the long, long driveway. Declan tapped away at his new cell phone in his peculiar Declan way, his thumb on one hand and his pointer finger on the other, glancing up just often enough to keep from walking off the driveway. Matthew threw animal crackers for the trailing dream creatures, careful not to chuck the food at the forever-sleeping cattle that dotted the pastures. The cows had been dreamt by his father. Well, by Niall Lynch, since Niall was not really his father. Matthew was father-free. Dreamt, just like the cows. And, just like them, doomed to an eternity of sleeping forever if something happened to Ronan.
When something happened to Ronan, Matthew thought.
A sour mood was rising.
He didn’t have a lot of practice at sour moods. He’d been a happy, feckless kid. Pathologically happy—he saw that now. Dreamt to be happy. Matthew had a hard time finding any memory that wasn’t full of good cheer. Even if it wasn’t a happy time, the youngest Lynch brother appeared in the memory with a plucky grin, like a sun flare in an otherwise dark photo, or maybe like a team mascot posing along with the players. Goofy and out of place but not necessarily unwelcome.
Like a pet, he thought.
All around him, unseasonable fireflies winked in and out. As Matthew watched them fade in and out even on this cool fall day, he wondered what kind of dream Ronan had been having to produce them. He wondered what kind of dream Ronan had been having to produce him.
His mind kept shouting the truth at him: You are a dream.
He hadn’t told anyone, but he was terrified of falling asleep forever. He’d already had a taste of it. Every time the ley line faltered, he went all … dazed. Enchanted. His feet began to walk, his body began to move, his mind went somewhere else. When he came to, he always found himself in a completely different location, his disobedient body having tried to take him closer to ley energy.
As trees took the place of the fields on either side of the driveway, Matthew hurled the entire box of crackers away from himself. The hand-cat said “Meow” in a disturbingly articulate way as it retrieved the box, but then a few little winged weasel things rushed out of the underbrush to fight for it until the cardboard box ripped asunder.
Matthew plunged past them, ready for the walk to be over.
“Matthew, stop,” Declan called. “I’ll go around.”
He meant to spare Matthew the security system Ronan had dreamt for the Barns since they left, a peculiar, invisible net of dreams that covered the end of the driveway. It not only made the entrance to the Barns very difficult to see, it also made you feel terrible if you did try to enter. Anyone who stepped into the net immediately began to relive bad memories. Awful memories. Stuff you thought you’d forgotten and stuff you wished you had. Stuff so wretched that people just gave up and went back the way they’d come.
Matthew was sort of drawn to it.
Secretly he frequented the end of the driveway while Declan was occupied in the farmhouse all day on his boring calls on his burner phone, and secretly he would suck in his breath and plunge into the net of bad memories again and again.
He didn’t know why.
“Matthew,” Declan said. He was cuffing his pants. There was a long way around the security system if one picked through the woods in just the right way, but even the right way snagged one’s slacks with brambles. It was a testament to how much Declan wanted to avoid the security system that he’d tromp through the woods instead.
Matthew edged toward the end of the driveway. “I’ll get it.”
“You are being even more ridiculous than usual.”
“BRB,” Matthew said.
“Matthew, for crying out—”
Matthew plunged into the security system.
The memories hit him like they always did, fresh as when they happened. His brain could not separate them from the truth.
This is what he remembered: losing himself. His thoughts slid into muddy dreaming. He climbed his school’s roof. The ground plunged hundreds of feet away. His body was unworried about the height.
This is what he remembered: He was mid-sentence with Jacob on the soccer field, and then he was forgetting what he was saying while he was saying it, and then he was watching Jacob wait and wait and wait for him to remember his train of thought as it never returned.
This is what he remembered: He was being woken by Declan by the banks of the Potomac River and realizing he’d walked there yet again without knowing it, and seeing all the creatures Ronan had dreamt dozing around him and realizing he was like them, he was a dream, he was a dream.
This is what he remembered: He was walking, dreaming, walking, sleeping, obeying a power outside himself.
Matthew.
A voice said his name.
This was the memory that he kept coming back for.
Sometimes, when he lost himself, he thought he heard someone calling to him. Not in a human voice. Not in a dream voice. In a voice-voice, in a language he felt like maybe was his real language.
He didn’t understand any more than that. So
