Chapter 2 #3
Peter moved on, mind so abuzz he didn’t think to look one more time for his gray-coated possible tail.
When it occurred to him later as he sped north in his car, he looked reflexively in his rearview mirror—and laughed at himself for it.
As if the wizards didn’t know exactly where he lived now.
As if any of them could show up, visibly, without drawing the entire town’s attention.
He got home without incident. He ate a spare dinner and spent the next three hours in his R&D lab, flailing, failing. Then it was time for sleep and the netherworld existence of dreamside.
Once, there was a clear distinction between these two halves of his life.
But one bled into the other now. His memories of what they did dreamside kept catching at him during the day, making his heart race and his hands shake.
And the problems of real life tagged along with him to the other side—now he would have to ask Beatrix if she’d started her dangerous campaign.
He ought to tell her about what he’d seen in Washington, too.
He lay in his bed for some time without falling asleep, eyes shut, everything dark around him, drowsiness creeping up by degrees.
The leap into dreamside happened, as always, as if someone had pushed a button on a projector and changed the slide that was the world around him.
His room snapped into focus, lights on, and he was standing by the bed rather than lying on it, looking at Beatrix sitting on his quilt.
He was so used to it by now that he didn’t so much as twitch.
Then she disappeared. That was a shock.
Did she wake up? Was something wrong? What happened?
He stood there, heart rattling, imagining the worst and trying to force himself out of the dream and into consciousness.
Rational thought caught up a second later: The only way into this neither-here-nor-there state was if he and Beatrix both were asleep.
The spell was broken—so to speak—the moment one of them woke.
He ran his hand over the quilt, feeling for an invisible body. He walked carefully around the room, looking, listening. Then, after what felt like ages, he caught the barest hint of motion on the ceiling.
He leapt onto the bed and reached up, catching at something warm, grasping her invisible arms. Hair he couldn’t see tickled the hollow of his throat. Lips pressed against his.
“You win this round,” Beatrix murmured.
He laughed. “What are you—”
The room around them—his room, where they almost always appeared—gave a tremendous jerk.
The sand-colored wall he could see right through Beatrix’s invisible body slid like a dropped coverlet to the floor.
His patchwork quilt undulated, each square turning sea-green one by one.
The spindly chair in the corner grew—to four feet, six, eight.
What was left of the bedroom faded and he was standing alone, no Beatrix at hand, with sand beneath his bare feet, the ocean reaching for his toes and an empty lifeguard’s chair perhaps half a mile distant.
He could do nothing but blink at it all for a moment, speechless.
“How did you do this?” he said.
He received no answer. And that wasn’t the question to ask, anyway. Why haven’t I thought of trying something like this before, perhaps. And: What uses—what amazing, mind-boggling uses—could we put this dream state to?
This was not a memory. If it had been, he would be seeing this through her eyes, from inside her head, feeling as if he were her. No, she’d created this—from scratch.
For a while, he didn’t even try to locate Beatrix. Their bodies were a trick of the dream, anyway. He crouched in the sand, feeling a hint of her presence in each grain. He let the water lap at his ankles and smelled her in the salt air.
After that he walked down the beach, eyes half-closed, trying to feel more than think—to sense the physical Beatrix amid her spellcasting, if that was the word for the magic they worked here.
Seagulls made companionable protests to each other.
The middle-of-summer sun warmed his cold feet.
He came to the lifeguard’s chair, the one that had been in his room, and climbed up to get a better view.
Beatrix, he thought. An appeal. A request.
He sensed more than saw the sand shift—it had to be at least thirty yards away, too far to really see.
Could he teleport there? He tried, and his body wouldn’t cooperate.
Beatrix had grasped something about dreamside’s rules that he had not.
But then, without taking his eye off that spot in the sand thirty yards off, he thought of how pleasant it would be to have a leaf in his hand, a red leaf, the fuel capable of teleporting him from one spot to another.
He’d held reds in his hands so many times that he could picture it exactly in his mind.
Nothing happened at first. But then something curled between his fingers, slightly rough to the touch and pliable, its stem pressed against his palm.
Without pause, he murmured the spellword—the first time he’d cast it since moving home—and came out the other side straight into her still-invisible body. He landed in an ungainly heap on the sand.
His groan was more laugh than complaint. A ghostly hand brushed against his face. Her disembodied voice said, “Are you all right?”
He reached up and kissed her, catching her lips on the first try. She leaned in. But then she slipped from his arms, quick as a cat.
“Beatrix!”
The next instant, it happened again. The world gave a tremendous jerk. The sand shifted, hardened. The seagulls took off. The lifeguard chair shrunk, stretched, its wood turning glossy and metallic. He turned in time to see—with a nasty jolt—a wave cresting as high as a three-story building.
It was a three-story building.
He was sprawled in the middle of Main Street.
This new, complex vision settled in more slowly than the beach had, buildings expanding to their proper size, lampposts twisting to full height. A tree across the road burst into red-leaf glory.
He ran a hand over the tan concrete that had been sand, then pushed to his feet—no longer bare—to examine Beatrix’s handiwork.
All the shops, he realized with a start, were occupied.
The millinery store he remembered from his childhood, the one in the building that today stood boarded up in the real world, had a cheerful “OPEN!” sign.
The shoemaker was there, too, and the jeweler.
He walked down the street, looking into unbroken windows, seeing people inside—hazy not-moving people, but close enough to lifelike if you squinted.
The sign on the general store stopped him dead. It did not say CROFT’S. It bore the name that had been there when he left town at thirteen. HARPER’S.
Bells tinkled as he walked in. Mr. Harper—the father Beatrix lost long ago—stood behind the counter. A girl leaned on the other side, brown braids hanging down her back, a smile reaching ear to ear. Beatrix as he remembered her in their last year of school together. Before her life fell apart.
He felt sick.
“Come here,” he urged, sure she was in the store somewhere. The air crackled with her grief. “Beatrix, please.”
She slipped into his arms, snapping into visibility the moment they touched, covered from neck to toe in a dress as black as a void.
“This was a mistake,” she said, the words wavering. She pressed her face into his neck. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“A trip down memory lane can be dangerous,” he murmured, trying not to look at the girl with the smile far larger than he had ever seen on Beatrix, his Beatrix.
Or rather, Beatrix who was not and never would be his.
“Do you have any good memories of this time?” she asked, getting control of her voice. “You couldn’t.”
“Not many, no.”
But one of the exceptions tugged at him.
He stood in the shop for a moment longer, trying to fight an urge he knew would only bring pain, and then he walked out, holding onto Beatrix’s hand, bringing her with him.
She followed him without question down Main, past trees with lifeless brown leaves, into a building near the train tracks and up the rickety stairs to the second-floor apartment.
The door was locked. He reached into the shirt she’d unbuttoned, before this stopped being a game, and pulled out a key on a string, a memory twenty years old. His memory, not Beatrix’s, creating it out of thin air somehow. The key turned in the lock. The door opened.
He looked, just looked, at his grandmother as her image swirled into being in front of them.
Another memory twenty years old. Nan’s eyes were tired, her body stooped, but her mouth turned up in a laugh frozen in time and her arms were held out.
For him. My darling boy, come here. He reached out to touch her cheek with fingers that shook, but this vision of her was as cool and insubstantial as fog.
Beatrix’s arms went around him and he leaned into her instead.
“Why was there never a funeral here for her?” she asked after a while.
“She was shipped to Arlington. The Academy let me scatter her ashes on campus, and I was sent back to class.” He had to clear his throat, which was closing up. “I was two days shy of fourteen.”
“Did you have other family to go to?”
He shook his head. “Nan was all I had. The Academy was appointed as my guardian, but they’re already fairly well in charge of young wizards’ lives. The main difference for me was that I stayed there over holidays.”
“Oh, Peter,” she said, dismay in her voice.
“It’s not quite as bad as you’re imagining. Christmas was always dour, but summer break on a huge property with its own swimming pond and forest is no hardship.”
“How long did it take before you played in the pond and the forest?”
He hesitated before letting the admission out. “Two years. I wasn’t … ready.”