Dreamers Often Lie (5 page)

Sadie shrugged. “I’ve never seen a fairy queen. Maybe they all have staples in their heads.” I snorted, but Sadie squeezed me tighter. “You’ll heal. You already look much better.”

“You mean I looked
worse?
”

“Well, in the hospital, when they first let us in to see you . . . Yeah, you looked worse.” Sadie’s voice was suddenly small. “Head wounds bleed a lot, you know.”

“I know.”

I could practically feel Sadie’s thoughts seeping through her shoulder into mine. Our constantly-in-motion father lying so still in that narrow white bed. His bruised eyelids. The tube wedging his lips apart. The bandages wrapped around his head, where the blood from flying shards of glass seeped through, forming tiny pink blossoms in the white gauze.

“God,” I whispered. “Mom must have been . . .”

“Yeah,” said Sadie, when I didn’t go on. “It was bad. At first.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” Sadie pushed a hank of my
hair into place. “Once you woke up, she got a lot better. It was just at first that it was really hard.”

“I don’t want her to have to feel like that again. Ever.”

“Well—hopefully she won’t,” Sadie said. “You look
so much
better. Really.” She gave my shoulders another squeeze. “Come on. Let’s go eat.”

She hauled me to my feet. Then she led me out of the room and down the stairs without letting go of my hand.

I
f you sit by yourself in a dark room for long enough, you’ll see ghosts.

We used to play this game at slumber parties: Find some dark closet or basement pantry and take turns hunched inside, waiting for the total blackness to form itself into impossible shapes. Then we’d lunge out, screaming.

It was a lot like brain rest.

For the next four days, I lay in my room, without music, with my velvet curtains shut, until morning blended into night and back into morning again. If I kept my eyes open, strange things started to appear on the ceiling. Cracks wriggled. Glow-in-the-dark stars moved. Shadows waved at me from the corner of my eye and disappeared when I turned to catch them. If I kept my eyes closed, the inside of my eyelids became the screen for movies played in fast-forward. Clips of school, classes, stupid things I’d said. A silly argument with Nikki over who’d heard of a certain band first. Pierce Caplan at one end of a half-empty hall, not even noticing me watching him from the other end.

But what my brain really wanted was to run lines for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Staring at the bumps on my ceiling was a ridiculous waste of time, and even my subconscious knew it. I’d wake up with Titania’s words in my head, or the fairies’ lullaby playing over and over, and have to try to push them out again.

I
needed
to run my lines. I wasn’t even sure how many of them had been left intact in my memory. If I didn’t catch them soon, they would dissolve and seep away. And then there was the folder of notes from Mr. Hall. The folder I hadn’t even opened.

The folder that Pierce had delivered.

Which, of course, brought me back to Pierce Caplan, Pierce and the tornado of questions and memories and stomach butterflies that came with him, and—

Empty stage. Empty stage.

Sometimes I hung on for a long time. I’d focus on the red velvet curtains and breathe in the dust and paint, and there would be no sound but the hum of anticipation coming from inside of me.

And then the voices behind the curtain would begin.

Michaela Dorfmann and the show choir girls whispering, my name sprinkled now and then into the hiss. Ayesha, the stage manager, calling for places. Titania giving her
Come sing me now to sleep
speech, and Hamlet’s voice interrupting,
But in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .
Mercutio from
Romeo and Juliet
rambling
about the fairy queen Mab who brings dreams in her nutshell chariot. Macbeth muttering,
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtain’d sleep . . .

And no matter how hard I tried to keep it still, the stage’s red velvet curtain would start to twitch.

Terror prickled through me. Every time. I was frozen, imagining who was about to step through the seam: Shakespeare, or Romeo, or Hamlet, or someone else. Some
thing
else. Whatever gruesome image my brain decided to toss into the middle of my thoughts like a grenade.
Something wicked this way comes
.

Then the curtains would rip apart, and my eyes would fly open, and I’d jolt up in bed, feeling sloshy and sick, and I’d try to focus on a ticket stub or program taped to my wall—any little, insignificant thing that could drag my brain away.

On the third night home—at least I think it was the third—I closed my eyes with the stage peacefully empty in my mind. A few seconds passed before a voice startled me.

“Jaye?”

My eyes flicked open.

My bedroom ceiling still hung above me, scattered with burned-out plastic stars. Between me and the ceiling were two faces. Nikki’s and Tom’s.

I felt my whole body brighten. “Hey!” I hauled myself onto my elbows. “What are you two doing here? Did you sneak in?”

They didn’t smile back.

“It happened again tonight,” Tom whispered.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. A tiny twinge of worry started to worm in. “What happened?”

Nikki’s eyes were wide. Almost frightened. “We knew you wouldn’t believe us unless you saw it for yourself.”

“With the things I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, I’d believe pretty much anything.” I glanced from Nikki to Tom. “Seriously. I don’t know if it was the injury or the medication or just—”

“Shh,”
hissed Tom. “Listen.”

We all froze.

The house was heavy with middle-of-the-night quiet. Even the street outside was still.

“I don’t hear anything,” I whispered back.

But both Nikki and Tom had stiffened. They backed silently away from the bed. For the first time, I could see that they were dressed in full suits of leather and chainmail. Nikki had a sword tucked into her belt. Tom held a long staff with a hooked blade at the end.

“Crazy costumes, you guys,” I whispered. “Why are you—”

This time Nikki cut me off. “Here it comes again!”

The two of them stared through my open bedroom door. I was sure the door had been shut when I’d lain down in bed, but now I could see straight into the hall, the walls silvery with moonlight from a distant window.

“It wants to speak to you,” Tom breathed.

They whipped my blankets back. Cold air rushed over me.

“Hey!” I reached for the quilt, but Tom had already grabbed my arm.

Nikki shoved my feet over the side of the bed. “Hurry! Before it leaves again!”

With all four hands, they pushed me through my bedroom door.

I staggered into the hallway. My baggy T-shirt and flannel pants suddenly felt as substantial as cobwebs. The air was ice-colored. Shivering, I glanced in both directions, from the dark holes of the other doorways to the black cliff of the staircase.

Something flickered there, in the darkness. Slowly, it turned toward me, and I could see its messy blond hair and haggard face.

“I saw him,” Hamlet murmured.

My skin cascaded with goose bumps. “Saw who?”

“He stood just there, as though he wanted to speak.” Hamlet gestured down the stairs without taking his eyes off me. “He wants you to follow him.”

I looked over my shoulder. Nikki and Tom were gone.

“Wait a second.” I turned back toward the staircase. “Is this . . . is this supposed to be the opening scene of
Hamlet?
Like, Nikki and Tom were the castle guards, and they’ve just seen the ghost of your father . . .”

Hamlet didn’t even seem to hear me. “We must follow it.” He plunged suddenly down the stairs, glancing back to make sure I was following. “Come!”

The usually creaky steps were silent. I padded down into the living room, Hamlet gliding ahead of me like a shadow, my bare feet freezing against the floor. In the dimness, I could make out the two armchairs, the cluttered little tables, but everything had turned fuzzy, all the edges blurred by moonlight. When I looked up, I saw that the windows were dark.

Hamlet paused at the threshold of the dining room, listening to something I couldn’t hear. Then he streaked into the kitchen. I hurried after him. The air seemed to be growing colder. My skin shriveled against my ribs.

Hamlet stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor, facing away from me. I followed his eyes. The door leading from the kitchen down into the garage hung open, letting in a gasp of icy, oily air. No wonder the house was freezing.

I reached out to close it, but Hamlet blocked me.

“The air bites shrewdly,” he murmured. “It is very cold.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m closing the door
.
”

He stopped me from reaching for the doorknob again. “It comes!” Hamlet’s cracked-ice eyes were stuck to something through that open doorway. “It wants to speak to you alone.”

I inched forward, across the threshold. There was
nothing beyond that door but chilly darkness. Not as far as I could see. But as I set my toes on the first cement step, I caught something else. A sound. A soft, repeating, rasping sound.

Hamlet hung back as I crept down the steps.

The cement floor was frigid. The scents of rust and gasoline and dirt and of something else—something sharper—twisted in the air. Our garage had no windows, and still, everything was suddenly lit with that fuzzy silver moonlight. The dingy walls. The stained workbench. And, right in front of me, the hulk of a strange black car.

It wasn’t our car. It didn’t belong here. But I knew exactly what it was.

The rasping sound came from the car’s far side. It sounded almost like someone raking dry leaves. Like heavy, painful breathing.

The side of the car that faced the kitchen door looked perfectly ordinary. I edged around the trunk, my throat turning sour, my heart tightening. The car’s other side slid into view.

It was destroyed. Just as I knew it would be. Metal panels crumpled inward. The front right corner folded up like a paper fan.

Something jingled against my toes.

I looked down. The garage floor was covered with broken glass from the car’s windows, some of the fragments as fine and powdery as snow.

The front passenger-side door stood open.

A body hung in its cavity, knees on the floor, head hidden inside.

My stomach lurched.

I didn’t want to see this. I didn’t want to get any closer.

But the rasping sound dragged me.

I staggered forward until I could see that the body wasn’t still. It was moving, rhythmically, back and forth, again and again. As it leaned back, I caught a flash of brown hair. A wide velvet collar.

I took another step.

Warmth seeped between my toes.

Something dark and thick was dripping through the open door. It splattered down onto the cement, pooling, spreading, its edge reaching for me.

The rasping stopped. Shakespeare turned and looked up at me, a red-stained rag in his hands. More stains, deep red against white, seeped up from the edges of his cuffs. He shook his head wonderingly. Tauntingly. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

For a beat, I was sure I was going to be sick. I lunged backward. My feet clinked through the glass as I charged around the wrecked car, up the stairs, back into the kitchen.

I slammed the door behind me.

Doubled over, heaving, I stumbled through the dining room. Hamlet had disappeared. I pounded up the staircase,
along the silent hallway, and through the door of my own bedroom. I slammed that door too.

I flung myself onto the bed and switched on the reading lamp. I yanked the quilt over me, curled into a tight ball, and pressed my thundering head against my knees.

Breathe.

The shards of glass. The dark puddle. That awful rasping sound.

I dug my fingernails into my palms until pain lanced up my arms.

Empty stage. Empty stage. Empty stage.

But I couldn’t clear this away. And if I was sleeping, I didn’t wake up.