Bedtime Story (22 page)

He put on a smile when Chris opened the door, but the expression quickly receded. “Hey,” he said cautiously.

Chris didn’t say anything, and held on to the doorknob with one hand.

“I brought coffee.” Dale gestured with the tray. “It looks like you could use some.”

Chris was pale and haggard, his shirt hanging loose, his hair messy and dirty. Dark circles around his eyes against the white of his face made him look like he was wearing a mask. He stepped to one side to let Dale enter.

The apartment looked as rough as Chris did. Clothes were strewn across the floor, books and papers on every available surface, the air thick with the smell of cigarette smoke.

He passed Chris a cup. “I thought you might be at the hospital.”

“I came home a couple of hours ago. Nothing I could do there.” His voice was ragged.

“So,” he said, looking pointedly around the room before letting his gaze settle on Chris. “I guess I don’t have to ask how you’re doing.”

“Surviving,” Chris said as he sat down in the desk chair and gestured for Dale to take the Stickley-style reading chair.

“Barely,” Dale said as he sat down. “You look like hell, actually.”

“Thanks.” Chris tipped his cup toward Dale in a mock toast.

“Have you slept? At all?”

“A little bit,” Chris said, with a guarded tone that Dale knew meant he was lying.

“Right,” he said. “How’s David?”

Chris didn’t say anything for a moment. “He had another seizure. Last night, at about eight.”

“Was it a bad one?”

Chris nodded.

“Is he okay?”

Chris exhaled a sharp, sad laugh. “That’s the question, isn’t it. I’ve been going through my books—” He gestured at the table beside Dale, at the stack of home medical encyclopedias.
The Merck Manual
was on top of the pile. Since when did Chris have a
Merck Manual
? “And trying to find something online, but I can’t figure it out.”

“You don’t need to figure it out, Chris,” Dale said, rattled by the pure desperation in his friend’s voice. “That’s what the doctors are there for. They’ll figure it out.”

Chris sighed heavily.

“What?”

“I don’t …” He leaned back in his chair. “I’m not sure they will.”

“You’re just tired,” he said. “You need to take care of yourself, and of Jacqui, and let the doctors take care of David.”

Chris shook his head, fiercely and decisively, a look of frustration flashing across his face. “I don’t think they’re looking in the right place.”

“What do you mean?”

He reached past the laptop and picked up a book from the desk. “Ever since I gave him this for his birthday, David’s changed.”

Dale took a sip from his coffee, avoiding looking at Chris.

“I don’t know what happened. I liked it when he started reading,
all on his own. You know how hard that is for him. But then he, I don’t know, he seemed to get obsessed with the book.”

“And you think it had something to do with the seizure?”

Chris ran his fingers through his dirty hair. “I know how stupid that sounds. I’ve been doing all this research … Reading doesn’t cause seizures. The brain doesn’t work like that.”

Dale was about to speak, but Chris cut him off. “But I can’t help it,” he said, arguing against words that Dale hadn’t had a chance to speak. “I saw how the book was affecting him. I mean, come on, threatening a teacher? And now, when I read to him, he calms right down. He stops fidgeting, his eyes stop moving.”

“His eyes?”

Chris leaned forward excitedly. “His eyes. Even though he’s … unconscious … his eyes are moving. Back and forth, back and forth. It looks like he’s still reading.”

He slumped back into the chair.

“It’s not the book,” Dale said, quietly and carefully. “You need to get some sleep. You’re not going to do anybody any good if you’re too tired to even think straight.”

“I know,” he said, nodding slowly.

“Listen,” Dale said, standing up. “I’m gonna hang around here for a bit. Why don’t you crash for a while?”

Chris looked at him for a long moment.

“Seriously.”

He smiled a grateful smile as he rose unsteadily to his feet and went to his room.

Dale started to straighten up the apartment. He didn’t try to be quiet—it was probably better for Chris to have a reminder that he wasn’t alone. He avoided Chris’s desk, knowing better than to interfere with the organization of his work. He put mugs and glasses into the sink to soak, emptied the ashtrays and dumped the take-out containers that littered the counter. He threw the loose clothes into the laundry hamper and put out the overflowing garbage.

Finished tidying, Dale leaned into the bedroom doorway. Chris was lying flat on his back, arms thrown out, his breathing rough and deep
and regular. Dale looked at him for a few moments, then washed the dishes and let himself out of the apartment, closing the door quietly behind himself, the locks clicking sharply into place.

“We tried to save you.”

As the mist creature spoke, other faint voices echoed its words. David could make out other shadowy figures forming in the flickering light from the torch on the floor across the room. He relaxed slightly against the cavern wall.

“Save me?”

The creature had taken on a small, shimmering humanlike form. He seemed to be standing in the air next to David. “We tried.”

David could almost read sadness on his grey, indistinct features.

“You saw what the Sunstone did, when you touched it,” the voice said. “We tried to stop you.”

David remembered the shock, how it had made his heart jump in his chest.

“I thought you were trying to kill me,” he said, still suspicious. “I thought you were one of the tests, the traps set by Gafilair.” The words came so naturally to him now.

“No, not a test. We’ve seen what the Sunstone can do …” The voice trailed off.

“We touched it, too,” said another voice, which sounded as boyish as the first, if not younger.

“We all touched it,” said the first figure. “That’s why we tried to save you.”

And failed, thought David.

“The Queen sent all of you as well?”

The shapes looked to one another again. “Yes and no,” the first voice said.

“What does that mean?” David asked, starting to lose patience.

“I’m the only son of Mareigh, who runs The Mermaid’s Rest tavern within the walls of the lower city,” the first voice said. “Captain Bream came for me one morning. I thought I was in trouble for attacking
two of my mother’s customers the night before …”

As the first voice continued speaking, another voice began. “I’m the only son of Mareigh …”

“But instead I was introduced to the Queen, and her adviser, a magus by the name of Loren …”

Another voice started to speak. “I am the only son of …”

“I was told that I was the only one who could save the kingdom,” said the first voice. “That I had been written of in a prophecy …”

David struggled with the words, trying to figure out some sort of explanation, anything that might help him make sense of this.

“We were attacked on the road by Berok assassins …”

David felt himself growing cold.

“And the morning that we left the inn, the captain called the innkeeper’s wife to him, and said—”

“Tell your husband he lives by mercy of the King,” David muttered at the same time the mist creature spoke the words.

The room fell silent as the voices stopped.

“Yes,” the first voice said quietly.

“But that’s my story,” David said weakly.

“That’s
the
story,” the grey figure said. “That’s the story that brought all of us here. It ends with a flash, and death. It ends with the Sunstone.”

David had to take a deep breath to hold down the bile he felt rising in his throat. He looked between the grey, misty figures. “But … who are you?” he asked.

“We’re all that remains,” the first voice said, heavy and slow, “of those who have come before you. Each of us the one and only hero who could save the kingdom.”

I waited in bed for several minutes after I heard Dale lock the door and walk down the stairs. It was stupid, lying there, faking sleep in case someone checked on me—now I knew how David felt. But this way Dale got to feel like he was looking after me, and I could avoid his skeptical looks about David and his reading.

In the distance, there was the sound of a van door closing, of an engine starting. I crept from bed and skulked over to the window to peer out. Dale’s van was gone.

Back at the desk, I tossed the medical books onto the reading chair; the medical stuff was a dead end anyway. Dale had said something near the end of the conversation: “It’s not the book.” He’d been debating a point I hadn’t made, firing a connection that I hadn’t even considered.

What if something about
To the Four Directions
itself had caused David’s attacks?

I flipped slowly through the pages, trying to find the place where the book had fallen open in the hospital room, the place in the story where David had been overcome.

David had been reading a suspenseful section of a novel that he’d been obsessed with for days, and at the moment that the hero of the story is overcome by unknown forces, rendered unconscious and senseless, David had a seizure that left him unconscious, senseless.

It was a bit of a stretch, but was it possible that he could identify so deeply with a character in a book that he might physically respond to the injuries that the character suffered? Could his unconsciousness be his way of responding to the trauma suffered by Dafyd in the book?

The first time I could really recall being that immersed in a book was reading those first Lazarus Took books at my grandmother’s place. Those few weeks when I was eleven, I wasn’t really in Henderson at all—I was taking to the road with the travelling players in
The World a Stage
, hiding in the woods from the King’s Men in
The Road to Honour
, trying to find my sword and my destiny in
Shining Swords and Steel
.

I remembered vividly the way it had felt when I had to stop to have dinner or to go to bed: the real world seemed a strange and disappointing place, and a pale substitute for the life I was living in the stories.

I’m sure that I had had similar experiences before then—Lazarus Took probably came to mind because of David’s book—but I couldn’t think of any other books that had taken me quite that deep.

It made sense to start with Lazarus Took.

I had just gone to LazarusTook.com when I heard a soft knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs, then the gentle rattling of keys.

Jacqui.

“You’re ghosts,” David said in a whisper. “Spirits.”

The grey figure who had been speaking the most nodded his head. “I guess we are.”

“Then who … who are you?”

The spirit looked at him. “The name the book gave me was Matthias. My real name is Matt. Matthew. Matthew Corvin.”