When I step out of the alley, there’s no one on the street and no traffic. But I remember seeing Pelly turn to the right, so I run down the pavement in that direction, stopping at each cross street to listen for the little invisible toy orchestra.
Nothing.
I’m about ten blocks from home when I give up and start to head back. Turning, I bump right into Pelly.
We’re alone on the street. No gangs of fairy creatures, no toy-instrument soundtrack. Just the two of us.
“So what happened to your friends?” I ask.
“They’ve gone to a revel.”
“A revel.”
“It’s like a rave, only for fairy folk.”
Of course. If you’re going to dream about fairies, they might as well be the party-hearty types.
“You should go home,” Pelly says.
“I am home. I’m just dreaming this.”
“You should stop dreaming this.”
“We’ve been through this already,” I tell him. “It’s not like I have any control over it.”
“You should try harder.”
“Oh, for god’s sake. What’s with you? I know I’ve changed since I was a kid, but do you have to treat me like this? You used to be my friend.”
“I’m still your friend. That’s why I’m telling you.”
“What happens if I don’t stop dreaming about you?” He hesitates before he says, “Then they win.”
“They? There’s a ‘they’ now? Who are they?”
“Go home. Wake up. Forget about all of this. Teach yourself not to dream what others would have you dream. Please, Imogene.”
I shake my head. “Not until you tell me who they are.” He tries to wait me out, but I stand my ground. I stare into his big eyes, refusing to blink. We used to have staring contests all the time, and I always won. Just like I do now. He sighs and looks away.
“Fairies are doing this to you,” he says.
“What? That little gang of critters that hangs out with you in my closet?”
He shakes his head. “The fairies in the school where your dead friend lives.”
“I knew he had something to do with all of this. So what’s his game?”
“He doesn’t have one. He just wanted you to believe him, and the fairies offered to make that happen.”
“So dreaming about you is supposed to make me believe in fairies? Hello, big difference between dreams and real life.”
“Are you so sure of that?”
“Well, yeah,” I say, except something in his eyes tells me different.
Oh, relax already, I tell myself. You’re dreaming. Anything can seem real in a dream.
I tell him as much.
“Hold fast to that thought,” Pelly says. “Don’t give in to them.”
“Who? The imaginary fairies living in the school?”
He shakes his head. “Just go home, Imogene.”
“Not until I understand what’s going on,” I tell him.
He gives me a look that’s—oh, I don’t know. Tender and loving, which is really weird because he still has these seriously scary eyes. Then his gaze lifts from me, looks past me, and the warmth goes cold.
I turn to see what he’s looking at, but there’s nothing there. Just the street, the buildings fronting it, the shadows of the buildings that are pooled in the stoops, and the alleys running between them. Then I get one of those what’s-wrong-with-this-picture feelings and I realize that the shadows are encroaching into the light cast from the street-lamps, and that’s impossible.
“We’ll talk more another time,” Pelly says from behind me.
He pinches me on the back of my arm and I wake up, except here’s the really weird part. I’m still standing on the street, just like I was in the dream. The only difference is there’s no Pelly, and the shadows across the street are doing just what they’re supposed to, which is retreat from the light cast on them.
Okay, I tell myself, as I can feel the panic rising in me. This is still just part of the dream. You haven’t woken up completely.
So I try to wake up, but that’s a no-go, and I’m totally on the edge of wigging out now. I close my eyes and force myself to breathe evenly. I wait, and when my heartbeat finally starts to calm a little, I start for home.
It’s not a fun ten blocks.
I keep expecting I-don’t-know-what to come out of the shadows and jump me—fairies, monsters, maybe just your ordinary everyday mugger or rapist—and that’s not normal for me because I’m usually fearless. It’s what got me into all the trouble back in Tyson and why Frankie and his gang took me in. They couldn’t believe this little hippie chick wasn’t scared of anything. Well, except for people not liking me, and I never told them that and I’m pretty much over it now anyway.
But I make it home okay to find Jared sitting out on the front steps of our building, smoking a cigarette. We have the street to ourselves except for an old stray tabby that’s watching us from a couple of stoops over.
“I thought you’d quit,” I say as I sit down beside him.
“I have. I just wanted one tonight.”
Jared’s one of those obnoxious people who can smoke when he wants to but never has to have a cigarette.
“I thought you’d given up prowling around at night,” he adds.
“I have. This is just a dream.”
He gives me a funny look. “Well, at least you’re still weird. It’s been getting so I don’t even recognize my own sister anymore. Used to be, I just had to look for the closest hullabaloo, and there you’d be, right in the middle of it.”
“I like that word.”
He smiles. “I know you do.”
“Do you miss that other sister?” I ask.
“Nah. I’m happy to have you no matter what you want to be. Now go to bed.”
“I’m not tired.”
“I know. You’re just dreaming. But you’ll be sorry in the morning if you don’t.”
He puts out his cigarette and gets up.
“Coming?” he asks.
“Sure.”
* * *
When I get up in the morning, Jared remembers our conversation from last night.
I hadn’t been dreaming.
After I leave Imogene at the baseball diamond, it takes me a while to track down Tommery. I feel bad for just fading away on her the way I did, but what was I supposed to do? It was obvious that she was mad at me, but she’d be even madder if she knew what I’d done. I didn’t even know what I’d done, exactly, but these dreams of hers had to have something to do with my asking Tommery to let her see him and the others. And all because I wanted her to know that I hadn’t been lying to her about them.
Tommery and Oshtin are racing beetles in an elf bolt off the computer lab when I finally find them. They’ve written numbers on the backs of the beetles with different colored Magic Markers and sit beside them, nudging the unwilling participants back onto the track drawn on the floor whenever the little insects go wandering out of bounds.
“Hey, Addy,” Tommery says when I sit down beside them.
“What are you doing to Imogene?” I ask.
Tommery gives me an innocent look.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all.”
Oshtin giggles, but since he doesn’t look up, I don’t know if it’s because of what Tommery s said or something that the beetles are doing. Tommery shoots him a dirty look, which says it all, I guess.
“You’ve got to be doing something,” I say.
“Only what you asked us to do. Preparing her to see into the Otherworld.”
“She says she’s being sent dreams.”
“That’s how we do it, Addy. We send her dreams until they become more and more real to her, and then finally she sees when she’s awake, just like she does in her dreams.”
“She doesn’t like it.”
Tommery shrugs. “I suppose it’s a little disconcerting, but they can’t hurt her. They’re only dreams.”
“I suppos
e ...”
“Don’t worry so much,” he says. “We would never hurt a friend of yours.”
I can’t argue that, but only because I’ve never had a friend before.
“You swear she won’t be hurt?”
Tommery puts a hand on his chest and gives me a hurt look.
“You know I don’t swear,” he says. “I’m far too polite for that sort of thing.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“So do you swear?”
He nods. “I swear that we won’t hurt her. But it’s a big bad world out there, so I can’t pretend she’ll never be hurt. She might step in front of a bus. She might fall down some stairs. She might have her heart broken by the boy in the record store that she’s dating.”
He means Thomas, whom I hate for being able to do all the things I can’t. He can hold Imogene and kiss her. All I can do is watch.
“Just so long as you don’t hurt her,” I say.
“On the root of my uncle’s oak, on the trunk of my sister’s ash, on the leaves of my own thorn tree, I so swear.”
I don’t know what all of that means, but it sounds pretty solemn, so I let it go.
“Thanks,” I tell him.
“Not at all. Care to race beetles with us?”
I shake my head. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”
“Careful of the gatherers.”
He means what I call the angels, these do-gooders who are always trying to convince dead people like me to stop hanging around in this world and move on to the next.
“I always am,” I assure him.
Actually, I don’t mind talking to them. It’s not much different from talking to some evangelical activist. I never had patience for that kind of thing back when I was alive, but now I sort of like listening to someone other than a fairy from time to time. A few of them can get so persuasive it’s scary, but most of them are okay and hardly preach at all after the first few times we’ve run into each other.
But I’ve never told Tommery any of that. He professes a complete lack of patience for anybody who gets involved in other people’s business—conveniently forgetting how much he and his friends do it all the time.
I leave them to their beetle racing and wander out of the school onto the streets. It’s late now, well past midnight, and I love the quiet. The whole city’s muted, though there’s still some traffic. Further downtown, the clubs are open and there are people everywhere. But around here, there’s hardly anybody on the streets, and the light you see coming from people’s windows is mostly the flicker of TV sets.
When I was alive, I’d sneak out of my parents’ place and just go wandering and look in through the windows of houses. I don’t mean I went right up to the glass; I just looked through them from the street. Doing that gives you all these little visual cues about what a person’s like: the kind of decor or lack thereof, paintings on the wall, bookcases, light fixtures, that sort of thing. I’d always duck into the bushes when I heard a car, or saw somebody else out on the street. I guess I was afraid of being arrested as a peeper, though mostly, I think, it was wanting to keep this secret. Kids don’t get to have a lot of secrets, not with the way their parents pry into their lives. Or at least the way mine did.
But one night, when I ducked into the hedge to avoid a passing car, I saw all these newspapers piled up on the porch of the house behind me. Right away, I knew what it meant: whoever lived there hadn’t been home for a while.
I waited until the car was gone, then crept closer to the house, curious. There wasn’t much to it—just an old clapboard house with a covered front porch. The stairs creaked as I went up onto the porch, and I froze. But nothing happened. I looked around, then tried the door. It was locked.
I don’t know why I had this urge to get inside. I didn’t want to take anything, and the fact that maybe whoever wasn’t bringing in his papers was lying on the floor somewhere inside, dead from a heart attack, certainly occurred to me. But I couldn’t seem to help myself. Or rather, I could have, but I didn’t want to.
So I went around the back. There was a summer kitchen, but the door to it was locked as well. Then I had a look at the basement windows. There were two in the back. The first I tried wouldn’t budge, but the second gave a little. When I pushed harder, it popped open. I hesitated a moment longer. Up until now I hadn’t done anything really wrong, but as soon as I went inside, I knew I’d be liable to all sorts of criminal charges, starting with breaking and entering.
I went in anyway.
What did I do? Nothing. I just walked around, pulse drumming, and looked at things. It wasn’t much different from when you go over to visit someone by invitation. My eyes adjusted to the poor light coming in from the street-lamps outside, and I wandered around, looking at the photographs and art on the walls, the titles of the books on the shelves. I didn’t touch anything. Finally I sat down on the couch and kind of dozed for a while.
I know; it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either. But I came back the next night, and the night after that. I would have gone in a fourth time, but when I walked by the front walk of the house that night, I saw that the newspapers and flyers had all been taken away and there was a light on in an upstairs room, so I just kept on walking.
After that I started looked for places like that old clapboard house, homes where the mail and papers were piled up and nobody was home. Every time I went in, I half expected to find that dead body that my imagination told me was going to be there, but all I ever discovered were empty houses full of stuff.
I’m thinking of all of this as I walk the quiet streets tonight. Being dead, I don’t have to look for an empty place. I can go in anywhere, and no one’s going to see me if I don’t want them to. But old habits die hard, and I don’t try a single place until I come to a dark house at the end of McClure Street and see those telltale newspapers scattered across its porch.
I don’t have to test for an unlocked door or window. I just drift in through the front door and go slowly through the house, taking my time, trying to replace my anxiousness for Imogene and what Tommery might have planned for her with the clutter of somebody else’s life. I’m upstairs, studying the faces in a scattering of family pictures on a dresser top in the master bedroom, when I hear the fiddle music rise up to me from down below.
The sound surprises me—not because someone’s in the house playing music, but because of who it has to be and what he’s doing here.
I step away from the dresser and go downstairs, and there he is. John Narraway sits on the sofa in the living room, head cocked to keep his instrument under his chin, some old-timey piece of music shivering its way into the air as he draws his bow across the strings. He stops playing when I come into the living room and lays his fiddle on his knees.
“Hello, Adrian,” he says.
I nod back and sit down on the edge of the coffee table.
John’s one of those angels, the people who go around helping the dead get on with their unlives and move on to whatever comes after. I wish he wasn’t always playing that fiddle of his. I didn’t like fiddle music when I was alive, and nothing’s come along to change that since. But John himself is okay. For one thing, he’s not at all pushy about his mission. So the reason I’m surprised right now is that he’s come here looking for me. I mean, he has to be looking for me, because the only time I normally see him is when we run across each other by accident on the street.
Here’s a funny thing about these angels: when you’re around them, everything seems to lose its immediacy. Sounds get thinner, and your surroundings start to lose their color. The angels say that their presence lets the dead see how the world really is for them now, but Tommery says it’s just something they carry around with them, like a little cloud of doom, and not to listen to them. I don’t know which is true, but I don’t much like the feeling.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” I tell him.
“I didn’t think you had,” he says.
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m not here for you.”
I look around. It’s obvious we’re alone, and I already checked out the house. Sure there’s a week’s worth of newspapers on the porch, but there are no dead bodies inside. No ghosts for John to move along.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I say. “Who are you here for?”
John gets that sad look that the angels do so well. It’s supposed to let the dead know that they really feel for us, I suppose.
“I’m here for people like your friend Imogene,” he says. “It’s too late to help her, but not too late to help the next one.”
Of all the things he could have said, that’s the last I expect. It plays right into the fears I’ve been carrying around since I left Imogene in the schoolyard.
“What do you mean, it’s too late to help her?” I say. “Help her with what?”
“Dealing with the anamithim.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Roughly translated, it means the ghost- or soul-eaters. Your fairy friends call them the darkness.”
If I had a pulse, it’d be quickening by now.
“What ... what will they do to her?”
John shrugs. “I don’t know. Swallow her light, I suppose.”
“Swallow ...”
I can picture it all too clearly, that wonderful glow of life she carries, just snuffed out.
“And you know what that means,” John says. “She won’t be able to go on. There’ll be no light to go on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She will just end.”
“You mean she dies.”
I can barely stand to say the words, because saying them feels too much like making them come true.
John shakes his head. “No, you died. You cast off your body and instead of moving on, you wander around in the world pretending you’re still alive. When the anamithim take her, she will simply end.”