Chapter Ten
Jack is waiting with obvious impatience at the entrance to the diner when Logan and I limp up. He’s probably been waiting
a while, and I decide I like that for him. Logan helped me walk along on my tiptoes so I didn’t do any more damage to my feet,
but it was slow going, and the whole time I kept wondering how it would have been if Jack had just picked me up. Like I’m
sure he’d been about to do before Logan appeared.
I tell myself I’m thinking about this purely from a deep concern for the length of time it took us to catch up with him.
Because there could be no other reason to keep thinking about it.
Jack says nothing as we approach. He just turns and leads us inside the dark of the diner. Logan and I both hesitate as we cross the threshold, but Jack doesn’t concern himself with us. He disappears into the dark. This is about to be creepy—
Until, after a few seconds, the lights pop on.
Logan and I share a glance.
“If this was real and not a dream, I’d be pretty sure he’s going to kill us,” I tell Logan. Because I need him to know, even in this dream, that I’m not messed up enough to think any of this is real.
I know what happens if I start believing in my own delusions. All the hard-won masks slip and everyone looks at me with pity
or fear. Nothing good comes from entertaining the things that have haunted me all my life.
Case in point, Logan rolls his eyes and tugs me forward with him.
Jack is walking back through the diner and into the little hallway I walked through yesterday. The one that leads to the antique
store. Logan pulls me along the same path.
I already know I shouldn’t look, but of course, I don’t have that kind of control. I glance out the hallway window as we pass
it.
Still in perfect frame, lit up and glowing, is that freaky clock tower. It cracks something in me. All this desperate holding
on to how this has to be one of my very realistic dreams. I can’t hold on to it looking at the clock tower, and it’s just
me and Logan right now.
Logan, the only one who’s never turned away.
“Am I dreaming, Logan?” I hear myself whisper as Logan pulls me into the antique store. “Or am I really finally losing it?”
He doesn’t answer—again—and that’s starting to freak me out. Logan always has answers, if not always verbally. Tonight he keeps leading me into the dark. This isn’t exactly comforting, either. We’ve
lost Jack somewhere along the way, so we stop. Or that’s why I stop. There’s a light from deeper in the shop and no doubt
we should move toward it, but neither of us seems to want to.
Everything is worse in the dark. I swear the dolls are glowing and the shadows are shifting, moving, undulating.
I hold on to my brother for dear life. I’d feel silly about it, but he’s holding me right back.
Is this the equivalent of going into the woods in horror movies?
Are we both about to end up pursued by hideous creatures—I think of the forked tongue and dead eyes I’ve seen already—or lured into a witch’s oven?
I’m mixing up my horror movies and those creepy fairy tales I read as a kid, but the creep factor remains.
“Sorry to wake you, Grandpa,” we hear Jack say, right before another light flicks on, illuminating the room we’re in.
That doesn’t make the doll situation any better, I note immediately. And I want to be relieved Harrison is involved, because
he was nice yesterday. But what if it’s an act and they’re tag-team murderers, and I’ve brought Logan here to die?
After all, I thought Harrison was luring me to my death by antiques at first. Maybe I was right.
Except it’s a dream, I remind myself, knowing it’s the only way to get through this. To remind myself I’ve felt this lucid and sure before, and
it’s never been real. And maybe this is more, but it isn’t different.
That actually is comforting because any and all deaths will just be dream deaths and when I can figure out how to wake up, everyone will be
hale, hearty, and alive, and I’ll be able to laugh it off or pretend it away like I always do.
I order myself to breathe.
Harrison is leaning heavily on his cane as he emerges from the dark. He sends Jack a bit of a wave as if to tell him not to
worry as he moves toward us, leaving Jack to trail behind him. While Jack is as scowly as ever, Harrison has a pleasant expression
on his ancient face. It feels welcoming.
After the rest of this bizarre dream, I feel the relief of that wash over me like some kind of happy spell.
“She was on the flood wall,” Jack says.
“So,” Harrison says, as if that answers a question I didn’t hear asked. “It begins.”
“They don’t know anything,” Jack says. Accusingly, to my ear. Which isn’t fair, even though he’s right. We clearly don’t.
Harrison doesn’t react to Jack’s tone. His kind smile morphs into something like concern as he reaches us. “No, this won’t
do,” he says, looking down at my battered feet. “We need to get you cleaned up. Come on now, sweetheart. Have a seat here.”
He pats a chair, and I find I actually like being called sweetheart by someone’s grandpa. “I’ll go see what I’ve got to bandage you up.”
“I’ve already got it,” Jack says in his gruff manner, a plastic first-aid box tucked under his arm and a washcloth in one
hand.
Logan gives me a nudge and I lower myself onto the chair. Then both Logan and Harrison reach for the washcloth at the same
time, and it almost looks like Jack is about to kneel down before me.
It might be the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me—which is why I’m still leaning toward psychotic-break dream. Because three men all look like they’re volunteering to be the one to wash up my feet, like they want to wash my feet—one who can’t kneel, one who doesn’t want to, and my brother.
Maybe it’s the my brother part of this equation that has me holding my hand out to Jack. After a strange pause, he hands me the washcloth. I don’t
want to look at any of them, so I lift my leg up and rest my ankle on my knee, using the washcloth to clean myself up. One foot, then the next.
The soles of my feet are tender but once the blood is washed off, it’s not as bad as it looked. Jack sets some disinfectant
and a small carton of bandages next to my chair, and in the suddenly tense silence, I take care of it all. I stick the bandages
across the scrapes at the bottoms of my feet. They aren’t very deep, so that’s . . . good, I guess.
When I’m done and force myself to look back at the tableau of men before me, Harrison’s gaze is sharp and focused—on me.
Logan is glaring at Jack, but Jack is glaring at the ceiling.
And I am sitting in this chair with bandaged feet, in my yellow novelty pajamas illustrated with various hunks of cheese, wondering why this feels like an endless slog of a dream I’ll never wake up from.
“What exactly did Amelia tell you two about Midas?” Harrison asks us after the silence has stretched out so long I’m tempted
to scream, just to see what might happen.
“I don’t know why you’re under the impression we ever spoke to Amelia,” Logan says flatly.
“We didn’t even know we had a grandmother before we found out about her will,” I add.
Both Jack and Harrison frown a little at this.
Harrison clears his throat. “But your father . . . ?”
“Never even told us he was from Iowa,” Logan finishes. “We don’t know anything about Amelia except that we inherited her shop.
We thought our dad had gone no contact with any family members years ago, though it looks like he actually sent a lot of photographs
here over the years. But the only thing we know about is that will.”
The old man laughs a bit, looking fondly off into the distance. “She was always so independent. Most women of her time would
have been ashamed to be a single mother, but never Amelia. She never told a soul who your father’s father was and laughed
when she was asked.”
“She was fantastic,” Jack says flatly, as if brooking no argument. Though no one is arguing.
But this is all new information. And Jack’s intense defense of the grandmother I never knew is oddly touching, but it’s like
Logan and I are frozen. Because I’m not sure either one of us was prepared for the idea of a grandmother we had to be . . .
a whole person. With a whole life, even before she left that will.
“I’m sure Amelia told me that your father somehow remembered in spite of it all,” Harrison is saying, his bushy eyebrows furrowing together.
“Remembered what?” Logan and I ask in unison, because we know our dad is a whole, real person, and he has never mentioned
this place.
Then again, there are the photographs only he could have sent her, so what do we really know about our dad when it comes to
Creeptown?
“Midas doesn’t let anyone leave without a price,” Harrison tells us quietly, as if those words make sense. “Sometimes Midas
doesn’t let a person leave at all.”
I feel like those statements should not go unremarked, but I don’t know what to say. The fact that Jack hasn’t jumped in to
correct his grandfather feels telling—but then I remind myself that none of this is happening. If this sweet old man wants
to think the town is sentient, let him.
Maybe in this dream, it is.
Harrison looks particularly intent. His gaze moves from Logan to me and back again. “What does the word harbinger mean to you?”
“Very old poems I was forced to read in school,” I say.
“As in harbinger of doom?” Logan asks, ignoring me. “Feels apt, but no special meaning.”
Harrison makes a kind of humming noise. Jack scowls deeper. These reactions make me hunch lower in my chair. I don’t want
to be here. I don’t want to hear about doom.
Because despite my snide aside regarding my literary adventures through Paradise Lost in high school English class, something inside me reacts to the word harbinger.
Like it’s an awakening. An unfurling of something, hot and bright.
I don’t like it. I don’t want it.
“Midas isn’t like other towns,” Harrison tells us, carefully. “The Darlings aren’t like other families. I’m not sure I’ll