In Dreams (5 page)

I move my face and glance to my left, and I see Grandpa raise the tongs high in the air. But before he can bring them down on the man’s head, the man whirls around. With one hand, he grabs Grandpa’s wrist tight. My grandfather drops to his knees and his face pales, then turns florid. I scream—a pitch so high and frightened and loud I didn’t know I had it in me.

“Grandpa!”

I tug on the man’s arm. “Don’t hurt him! I’ll do whatever you ask. Just please don’t hurt him.” I hear how desperately I am begging. How scared I am.

And then the man lets go. He whirls and grabs my face in his left hand, pressing his fingers into my cheeks until it hurts so bad tears stream down my face. “Remember . . . stay away.” Then he releases me and storms out of the house, slamming the door.

I run to the window. He whistles for his dog.
His three-headed beast of a dog. And the two of them start down the street, then disappear into a shroud of fog that has suddenly appeared from out of nowhere.

5

In dreams no man wears a mask.

EDWARD COUNSEL

I
ris, are you okay?” Grandpa asks shakily.

I nod, not trusting my voice. Grandpa and I survey the mess. It’s almost comforting that things are broken—that way I know it all actually happened. That I didn’t imagine the whole thing. That I didn’t imagine the man. Or his beast.

“Come on, let’s deal with this later,” he says, and wraps an arm around my shoulders, leading me into the kitchen. I lean my head on him, grateful for the scent of his Polo aftershave. For normal.

I touch my back pocket, thinking we should call 911. But what would I say? Our Chinese food was delivered by a man with mirror eyes and a three-headed dog?

“We need to do something,” I urge Grandpa. What, I have no idea. I guess I expect him to have the answers.

“We’ll talk.”

Talk?

I stare at him, but it’s clear he just wants us to sit down. Like he has to collect himself. But most of all, I notice that he doesn’t seem shocked. As for me, my stomach is tight, like an iron cable is wrapped around my gut.

I sit down and stare at the table. Then I lift my head and watch as Grandpa picks up and plops the brown paper bag containing our Chinese food onto the kitchen table. He unpacks it. As if nothing happened. But I can see his face is gray.

Amazingly, our Chinese food is hot and in perfect condition, except for one flattened wonton. I don’t know what’s more surprising: that or a three-headed dog.

Neither one of us says a word. I know I have no idea
what
to say. I watch Grandpa walk over to the cabinet next to the fridge. He takes out a bottle of single-malt scotch. The expensive stuff.

To be clear, my grandpa drinks only three times a year. He has a stiff scotch to toast the New Year. He has a stiff scotch on the anniversary of my
grandmother’s death. And he toasts her silently on their wedding anniversary date. He opens another cabinet and pulls out a large tumbler. His hands shake as he pours himself the biggest, stiffest scotch I have ever seen him drink. He finishes half of it with one swig. Then he adds some ice cubes and comes and sits at the table.

“Well, that was a weird one,” he whispers.

“Um, understatement of the year.”

I wait. I wait for him to tell me more, but he doesn’t. So I start, “Grandpa . . . I have the feeling there’s a lot you’re not telling me. Stuff you know. Stuff you’ve always known, maybe. About Mom. Me. Why she has her disease.” I think back to his Internet history. Something isn’t right. “And it’s time to tell me.”

He sips his scotch and starts to spoon his Chinese food onto his plate.

“Where do I even begin?”

“Why don’t we try the beginning? Unless maybe you want to start with Cerberus and Evil Eyes. And how you don’t seem too surprised that they showed up on our doorstep.”

He sips his scotch again. He unwraps his chopsticks. Then he nods. “The beginning is with your mother, I suppose. When she was about your age.”

He smiles at me. “You look like her, you know.”

“Stop stalling.” I give him a half smile.

He nods. “Well, she started having dreams. Vivid dreams. Dreams that were so real to her that your grandmother and I doubted her sanity. We loved her more than life itself, but our brilliant, charming, beautiful daughter would have a dream and then swear she saw something from her dream in real life.”

I stop, a chopstick-skewered shrimp halfway to my lips. “And you didn’t believe her?”

“We didn’t know
what
to believe. She had never lied to us—unless you count the one time she tried drinking with her friend Shane. And after
that
hangover, she never tried it again. But I mean, it does sound a little crazy. Impossible.”

“No crazier than a three-headed dog in our front yard.”

He smiles a little. “No, I suppose not.”

I eat a forkful of rice, not even positive I can keep it down after everything that’s happened. I sip my Diet Coke. Then I hold my breath a little and wait for him to continue.

“We were worried. She didn’t have many friends. You know how smart she is. She was very into her studies. Girl genius. Didn’t quite fit in at school. Plus she was so beautiful, I think other girls were a little jealous of her. And she seemed more interested in her
dream world than the real one. She sketched elabo-rate, beautiful—and sometimes scary—drawings of things she saw in her dreams. This was when she was thinking she might be a painter. So we took her to some fancy psychologist in Manhattan, with three degrees and an office on Park Avenue. He said it was something called lucid dreaming. Something about dreams being much more vivid and real than the way normal people dream.”

I put my chopsticks down on my plate. “And then what?”

“Well, like most teenagers, she stopped confiding in her parents so much. She went off to Vassar and majored in art history. Graduated first in her class. We were so incredibly proud of her, Grandma and me. Then your mom went to graduate school—and of course excelled. Got a job at the museum. Worked her way up to a curator position. And got pregnant. With you. We were delighted we were going to be grandparents. We didn’t ask a lot of questions. We didn’t care that your father was a . . . um . . .”

“A sperm donor.” Only I’ve always wondered about that story. Maybe now more than ever.

Grandpa stands. “Exactly. She had an important career, and the right man just never came along. Or so she told us. She just wanted to be a mother. It
wasn’t as if she needed a man for financial support. She was always so damn independent. A stubborn streak a mile wide. One minute.” He goes down the hall to his room, and I hear him rummaging through a drawer or something. He comes back with a photograph. He doesn’t hand it over to me right away but looks down at it.

“Your grandmother and I”—he points to his nose—“we could sniff out when something didn’t quite add up. And so despite your mother’s talk of a donor, we always assumed she would have at least discussed it with us first. So we had our doubts. And . . . we think this man is actually your father, not a donor.”

I take the picture, my hands trembling so bad, I have to put the picture down on the table so I can look at it clearly. It is a picture of a dark-haired man with hair the same shade as mine—and curls, too—and my mom. I stare at him.

My entire life, I never had a father. But there he is. In the picture, my mother is pregnant. And smiling. Smiling in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile. Pure happiness. They say pregnant women glow, and she is beaming. The two of them are not facing the camera. Like someone snapped the picture secretly. When they weren’t looking.

“Who took this?”

“Your grandmother. We weren’t spying. I promise you, Iris, we really weren’t. But when she was pregnant with you, your mom said twice in one week she had a ‘dinner engagement.’ This was unusual. She never talked about dinners out or dating. Only work—exhibits and collections and donors. And at the end of her pregnancy, she was so tired, she would generally come home, call Grandma to check in—Grandma was her birthing coach—and read or rest. So we just
happened
to show up at your mom’s favorite restaurant in Manhattan—Il Giardino—sort of hoping we might run into her. But then we saw her and suddenly thought better of being so nosy. We thought she might be mad. So Grandma just quietly snapped that picture.”

The man in the photo looks familiar. Weirdly so. He also doesn’t look real. I mean, he looks
human
enough, but he looks like a painting. From the Renaissance or something. Long black curly hair frames his face—I guess that’s where I get my hair from. And his skin is so smooth and pale, it looks almost like marble.

A strange tingle makes me shiver. Then it hits me. “Wait, I know him,” I whisper. “He’s from a painting!”

My grandfather nods. “Sort of.”

I leap from the table and go to the tall stack of my mom’s coffee-table books in the living room. She has dozens of them—glossy, heavy books filled with pictures of art. They are still scattered across the floor after that scene with our strange visitor. I furiously leaf through one, then another, then another until I find it.

A painting. From 1811. By Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.

Of the god Morpheus. The god of dreams.

He’s with the goddess Iris. I am named for her. She is a messenger. She links the gods and humanity.

I run back to Grandpa and toss the book on the table. “Here!” I put my finger on the slick page. “He looks
exactly
like this painting! Exactly!”

Grandpa looks up at me. “I know.”

“The Underworld—that guy who was just here threatening me told me to stay out of the Underworld.”

Grandpa nods. “I had no idea you were in real danger, Iris. I would have told you all this sooner. But I just didn’t know where to start. I’ve pressed your mother to talk to you, but she was afraid it would be too much for you to understand just yet. I think she wanted you to get through high school first. She will be so upset that you were actually hurt.” He reaches out his hand to my cheek, where I am sure I am developing a nice, ugly
bruise. “And then of course, her illness . . . she didn’t want to add to your stress. You already have enough to deal with for a girl your age.”

I start pacing. “Now I really have gone crazy. This can’t be. This can’t be, Grandpa.” No wonder he didn’t react with shock when Evil Eyes showed up. “All right . . . being as it’s spill-family-secrets time, I’m going to tell you something.
Show
you something.”

I lift up my leg and stick it on the table with a thud that rattles the plates, and then I pull up my jeans. I show him my ankle. The sharp scarlet of the vine imprint is still there, along with pinpricks of red. “This is
my
secret. I dreamed I was being pulled by vines. In a place. The place with the doors. The place I always dream about. And when I woke up, it was like it really happened. And I had these marks. And there was blood on my sheets. And then when I was hypnotized, I had a sort of dream, I guess. With these guys in dark suits and mirrored sunglasses. And afterward, I saw those same guys from my dream when Annie and I were driving down the street. In real life. And she saw them, too, so I’m not making it up. I didn’t imagine it. She saw them. They were here. Just like the three-headed dog. Just like the man with the eyes. So . . . am I crazy?”

“Not crazy, exactly.”

“The Underworld. Morpheus. That painting. Is my father really a god, one from the Underworld?”

My grandfather nods solemnly. “You’ve heard of dysfunctional families, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Lambie, you’re from the most dysfunctional family in the world. Or rather the Underworld.”

“You’re saying . . .” I am starting to hyperventilate.

“The gods. You’re part of them. On your father’s side. Your father is the god of dreams. And the fact that he has a human daughter—or half-human daughter, I guess—isn’t exactly making the rest of the Underworld happy. Put it this way . . . I wouldn’t expect we’ll invite them for Christmas.”

I take my leg down from the table and plop into my chair.