“Come in,” he said.
“Jake?” Melody again, from the kitchen.
“It’s a reporter, hon. I’ll talk to her downstairs.”
Annalese stepped into the hallway as Madeline hung her coat on a hook above the pile of shoes. “Is that smart?” she whispered to Jake.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said and there must have been something strange in the subtleties of his facial expressions because his sister-in-law kind of jumped and then tiptoed quickly back to the kitchen.
“Down here,” Jake said to the reporter. He led her through a door, down carpeted steps and into the finished basement where he and Cassie had played hide-and-seek last Sunday. It was a wide room with a tube TV and two comfy couches set around a large coffee table where they played Battleship and Connect Four and Chutes and Ladders. He pointed the journalist toward the red sofa. He went to the garden gnome as she started her questions.
“Where were you when you heard the news, Mr. Whitman?” asked Madeline, pushing a button that caused a red light to flash on her digital recorder. She kept it in her hand like Lois Lane.
“I was down here, actually,” he lied. “Jerking off to internet porn.” He packed a small bud into the end of a black ceramic bowl he’d bought at a head shop in Minerva during a camping trip to Pymatuning.
“Oh,” she said in a noncommittal way.
Jake sat on the couch across from her, the tatty brown one they’d shipped from Akron. “Yeah. Kind of into leggings at the moment. Girls in long hose, knee-high socks, fishnet. Foot-fetish stuff. So that’s what I’m exploring at the moment.”
“Huh,” said Madeline. She switched off the recorder.
He lit the weed with a gas station Bic, listened to it sizzle so, then drew the smoke into his lungs, held it, looked at her. He offered the bowl to the reporter. She shook her head. He exhaled at the ceiling. He looked at her, again, considered her widening eyes.
“Some of the reporters interviewed my daughter’s friends, today,” he said. “A reporter asked this boy what he saw. What did she expect him to say?”
“I wasn’t there,” said Madeline. “I just got in.”
“I know,” said Jake. “I know. But you’re here now.”
“I’m just trying to do my job.”
Jake nodded and took another hit from his bowl, then set it on the table. Madeline swallowed and then switched the recorder back on and pushed forward.
“What are your thoughts on gun control legislation after today?” she asked, her voice breaking on the last word.
“My thoughts on gun control legislation? Oh, I’m all for it. Because I have so much rage in me right now if I had a gun you’d already be dead.”
She ran. Ten seconds later, she was out the door, coat in hand, slipping on their drive on the way to her rental car.
He stowed the bowl and then went upstairs. Melody and Annalese watched him continue to the second floor but they didn’t say a word. In a minute he was in his office. This time he closed the door. He wrote until he fell asleep.
11
“What dream does it hold?” Liam asked the grander-da after Cassie fell asleep by the fire. He sat beside the old man on a wooden bench by the window and they shared a longpipe filled with dry Astrodon weed.
This grander-da’s name was Ivin, and he was Mestie priest. He’d lived in Dunedaire for seventy seasons, he said, and had only ever seen three dreamstones in his life. “Dunno,” said Ivin. “But there is one nearby who can read dreamstones.”
“Who?”
Ivin looked out the window to the peaks of the Gilded Mountains rising beyond Dunedaire, outlined by a full yellow moon. “When the scrim mines still provided, there was a dwarf foreman who lived in a hovel at the summit. He could read the purity of any gem the miners dug up. Merwin, his name was. They said he could even read dreamstones.”
Liam drew a long pull of green smoke and looked to the fire. He was young but not so young to still believe in happenstance. It was not chance this girl had wandered to Dunedaire with a dreamstone just as he was passing through. He knew a God-dare when faced with such. This was a choice for him, a challenge thrown down by the Gods, themselves. He could not ignore it even if it was a distraction that waylaid him from Raif, from his revenge at Banner’s Crossing. Perhaps this young girl and the magic she carried was important to his quest somehow.
“In the morning I will take her with me into the mountains,” said Liam. “We will find this Merwin and see how he might judge the dreamstone.”
“A fair choice,” said Ivin. “And the right one, I reckon. But be mindful, young knight of Banner’s Crossing. What may seem a God-dare may be but a wary trap set by the Dark One, himself.”
Liam nodded. “Yes, grander-da. I know it.”
The girl said not a word for the first hour of their journey and they rode along in silence, Liam on his steed, Gunner, Cassie on a pony named Bitey. The way to the summit of Hadden’s Peak, where Merwin’s hovel stood, was steep, a winding lane of broken flint called Hunter’s Pass and they had to hold tight the reigns and lean forward into their beasts of burden. The air became cool and bit at their wrists. The sun retreated behind fat grey clouds. Finally, Liam grew tired of the quiet.
“Where do you come from, Cassie?”
The girl pulled the hood of her strange fakey coat around her face so that he could only see the tip of her upturned nose. “I can’t remember,” she said.
“Do you remember nothing?”
“I remember strange things, sire,” she said after a moment. “Things they say must be dreams.”
“Tell me.”
“I remember a house where the warm air came from pipes and not from a fireplace. Boxes in every room that showed other people talking. A carriage that didn’t need a horse to pull it.”
Liam laughed. “Yes. Nightmares. I wonder… Your mind may have been muddled by a witch. Do you remember coming by a craggy woman who made you drink a bitter brew?”
“No,” the girl said.
The horses whinnied loudly as they approached a plank bridge that spanned over a wide gulch. Liam nudged Gunner forward with the heel of his boot and Bitey followed close by.
When they were over, Cassie said, “I do remember my father, I think.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. He wrote words on paper and people paid him for it.”
“More dreams, I’m afraid,” said Liam. “Only women write on parchment. It is not a man’s task. Parchment is rare. And men make too many mistakes.”
The sun was high above the mountain when they rounded a tight turn and caught site of Merwin’s hovel. It was a leany building, pushed against the path, untrue. A rock hovel with a grass roof. Smoke puffed from a broken chimney. Someone was home.
“Sire!” screamed Cassie.
He looked to the girl, drawing his six-biter in a flash. She pointed above them, to the grey sky over the Gilded Mountains. Her hood had fallen back and her young face was full of fear.
Liam heard the giant wings first, felt the winds they created on his back. Then he sensed the heat of the thing and the fire it carried in its belly. His heart went cold with terror. This was a trap after all.
It landed like a cannonball on the path in front of them. Flakes of flint exploded around its scaly claws. It was an Eastern Yilbegan, a red-belly from the Tartan Wastes. Helpless, they could only watch as the dragon drew in a fierce breath, stoking the fire that would surely roast them in another moment.
12
“Jesus, Jake,” said Melody. She stood above him, the printed pages of the new chapter clutched in her pale fingers, “What the hell is this?”
He shook himself awake, wiped a paperclip off his cheek and swiveled in his chair to see her better. He shrugged.
Her eyes were dry, cried out. She didn’t even seem mad to catch him writing about Cassie. In fact she was smiling. But it was the smile of a mother who’d found her son playing with himself for the first time. Not a good kind of smile.
“What?” h
e asked her.
She placed the pages beside the computer and then took his head in her hands. She ran her fingers through his thick hair. For a few seconds she held his head to her stomach. He pictured the nearby space where his daughter had grown inside her safe womb. It was empty, but he imagined it remembered the soul it nurtured for nine months.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” said Jake, finally. The sound of his voice was too loud to him, grating, insistent on its place in the universe. He never wanted to speak again.
“I know,” she said.
She pulled him up and brought him to their bedroom and closed the door and laid him down on the cotton sheets. “Hold me,” she said. And so he did. Her frame was frailer today, the bones in her body hollow like a bird’s, no food in her belly, no tears in her head.
“When are your parents…”
“Shhh,” she said. And then she kissed him, drew his lips to her own, pressed against him. “I want to be close. Be close to me. Take off your clothes.”
He slipped out of his sweat pants and then he could feel her hand on his prick, working slowly. He was a depressive type, especially on deadline, but even in his blues that part of him never slept. She opened and he entered. And they lay joined like that for awhile. Then she turned and nodded off to sleep.
13
Jake’s father, Tim, organized the funeral from an ad-hoc office in the basement later that afternoon. He was skilled at getting good deals, a thirty-seven year employee of a Cleveland lubricant factory where he managed import/export. He ran into some trouble finding a small coffin in Connecticut. The current inventory was stressed beyond expectation, he was told. So he bought one from a firm in Boston after they sent a jpeg from a grainy cell phone and then guilted them into shipping it for free. Jake’s mother, Lena, busied herself by setting up a Keurig in the kitchen. She wrote simple instructions about how to use it—red marker on white paper—and taped it to the side of a cardboard box filled with a dozen kinds of coffee. Half and hour later, the Kuerig was broken because Annalese hadn’t taken time to read the note. It appeared she had pierced a K-cup and tried to empty the contents into a hole in the machine.
They ordered lots of take-out. Every three hours, Melody’s father, Frank, a short man who painted cars, asked them what they wanted and then drove to three or four restaurants getting everyone’s favorite. Jake asked them to keep the television off but his mother-in-law kept sneaking it in the basement. Once, he overheard the voice of Mike Huckabee on Fox News, drifting up the basement stairs: “We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”
At three that afternoon, a young cop from Newtown arrived at their doorstep. Jake opened the door and the cop stepped inside and spoke in a soft voice. “Give it to me,” he said. “All of it. Right now.”
Jake took him to the basement and over to the broken gnome. The cop put the pot in his pocket and then left again without a word.
Melody spoke to the parents of other dead kids on the phone. Razzle rested his head on her feet but never slept that day and only ventured away from her long enough to chow some kibble and do his business on George’s sidewalk.
Jake watched Jurassic Park with his father, a VHS copy, on the television in the basement. Sometimes the picture got all wavy and garbled and Jake had to fast-forward manually because the remote had disappeared years ago.
“You should have another kid right away,” his father said as the T-Rex whomped the park bathroom, exposing the lawyer.
Jake nodded but didn’t look at him.
“Not… it’s not to forget Cassie,” he said. “It’s so you have somewhere to put all that extra love.”
Frank returned with Taco Bell and a case of Miller Lite around eight and they spent the evening playing euchre at the dining room table. When Jake went in alone and got busted by a wayward bitch, Melody laughed. She tried to catch the laugh on the way out of her mouth with her hand, to push it back in. Then she started crying and couldn’t stop and Lena put the cards back in the box.
14
Jake lay next to his wife for a few hours that night, listening to her deep Ambien snores. He could smell marshmallows on her breath. He pictured possible faces of another baby. What if it was a girl and she looked just like Cassie? What if they had a boy and it grew up to be something like Adam Lanza? Maybe they should adopt. Maybe they should get a little Chinese girl who would have been left in the woods to starve to death. Do they let parents adopt if they’d allowed one of their own to die?
At a quarter past four, Jake gave up and climbed out of bed. The house was quiet but he could feel how full of people it was. It’s possible the house had never had so many people sleeping inside it at the same time. The dull buzz of his mother-in-law’s apneatic growls filled the hall. He made his way quietly to his office and closed the door.
He went inward to see if the inspiration was there to write. For Jake, he only had so much inspiration on a given day. He pictured it like the fire that exists inside the belly of a great dragon. It needed to be stoked. If he used it too quickly, it would fizzle out and then it would take days to get the fire going again. Usually, Jake had enough inspiration to produce three to five pages each morning but the inspiration pittered out around noon most days and then he had to wait until the next morning before the fire was warm enough for him to start again.
Tonight was different. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t rested. But as soon as he looked inward, he felt that fire, that urge he’d had since he was a child, the urge to write to write to write!
15
The Eastern Yilbegan rocked back on its hind legs, bracing for the explosion of fire that was about to erupt from its maw. Liam fired a single shot, aiming for the weak scales under the beast’s belly but the bullet bounced off like a pebble. Cassie screamed and shielded her face from the hot air.
“Sitzen Sie sich!” came a voice from behind the dragon.
The Eastern Yilbegan abruptly settled. It snorted a black, noxious snort from its nostrils and then curled up into a large scaly ball beside the owner of the voice, a fat old dwarf with grey hair. He wore a long leather coat and leaned on a darkwood cane.
“Are you Merwin, the former foreman of the Gilded Mountains?” asked Liam.
“Ayup.”
“I am Liam Tenderheart, Prince of Banner’s Crossing,” he said. “We have brought you a dreamstone, dwarf.”
Merwin’s hovel was tidy but stuffed, a wood den filled with treasures that meant nothing to Liam. A pile of spades by the garden door. Crates of slag from the smelter that once cooked night and day inside the Blue Mountain. Stacks of old tomes with curious colorful fronts; a cookbook, its cover a burning man on a white background; a field book on the ryegrass, this one a red knight on a white horse.
The old dwarf led them to a nook where they could sit around a table. Once his guests were seated, Merwin busied his hands with fresh tea on the kettle. Outside, the Eastern Yilbegan walked loud circles around the house. Its name was Montag.
“Is it true you read dreamstones?” asked Liam. He was growing impatient. They didn’t have time for tea. He intended to be off the mountain before sunset. The caves here were probably full of weavers.
“No,” Merwin muttered and Liam’s heart sank. “But she can. And I can help her to it.”
“The girl can read it?”
“Yes, sire. A dreamstone can be read only by its intended. But I can open it up to the barer of the gem, help them along to an understanding.”
“Will it hurt?” Cassie asked, nervously.
“Nein,” answered Merwin, shaking his head. He set a cup of tea in front of Liam and then held his hand out to the girl. “May I see your magic, young daughter of Eve?”
Cassie unclasped her strange hide and then lifted the amulet from around her neck and passed it to the dwarf. It’s blue stone went silent as soon as it left her thin fingers, darkened
to a dull azure.
“Humf,” said Merwin, crinkling his nose. “It’s heavy.”
He polished the stone with the back of a hand. Closed his eyes. Whispered, “Alles hat ein Ende.” Now the stone grew warm and bright again and Liam became aware of something like a sound that vibrated his teeth and set his ears ringing. Then he handed the dreamstone back to the girl. “See the dream,” he said. “Tell us the story.”
“I don’t know…” the girl began but then the stone flashed green and her eyes grew wide. “Oh!” she said. “I see…”
“Yes? Yes? Tell Merwin. What does she see?”
“A man sitting alone in a little room,” said Cassie. “And he’s writing a story. A story about you.” She looked to Liam.
“What else does she see?” Liam asked.
The dwarf grew concerned, scratched his nose with one pudgy finger. “It’s UpWhere,” he said. “She sees the dreamer. One of the dreamers of Farthermore. But what is your dream, lassie? What is the dream held within this stone?”
“I can hear his voice in my head,” said Cassie. “This is many years ago. He has just been married. He is thinking of having a first child. He wonders if he should.” Her eyes became glassy and far away.
“Yes,” said Merwin.
“He thinks of all the dangers in the world and how big it is. And how small a child can be. He’s thinking of this as he’s writing the story and he’s thinking of going to his wife and telling her it’s time. Yes, it’s time to have a child. That is the dream. His dream. The idea that he should bring a child into the world. And somehow he knows it will be a girl. He can see her face and…”
In shock, Cassie opened her hands. The dreamstone tumbled onto the table.
“It’s me,” she said. “The girl is me. The man in the little room. That man is my father. And this…” she said, picking up the amulet.
“It’s his dream of you,” said Merwin.
“What does it mean?” asked Liam.
The old dwarf’s face drew grim. “A dream can be the most powerful magic,” he said. “Dreams inspire. Our world, all of Farthermore, is made of such inspiration. Created in the dreams of men like Cassie’s father. I believe he has sent her here with a choice.”