The Radiant Road (22 page)

Ourwordsmakeshapesandeveryshapeistrue
, whispered the ghostly song of the pipes.

Her hand was empty. Finn had vanished. Clare looked around the bare front room, a little wildly, then once more put her head
into the old man's room. High on the wall, in chalky blue-gray, she saw new words, in a new, spikier handwriting:
The fish that swims must flap its
, the new words read. Must flap its
what
? thought Clare, squinting to read the last scrawled word.

Fin
. Must flap its fin. Clare pulled back, pressed her back against the wall, and put a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Such a grim situation, and yet such a good joke.

But how to join him?
Just think it
, Finn had said.
As if it were your own dream.

Forwordswereallthemusicyoucouldhear
, whispered the pipes.

Clare thought. She thought of a line to fit the watery words of this plumbing-haunted room, to complement, to fit in and not to spoil the old man's dream (if he was really an old man, or really a man, even—there was no way to know). She thought of an old poem she'd had to memorize in school, and smiled to herself.

Soon, high on the wall, too high to be erased, and just beside
the fish that swims
, were new words, in small, looping, orange-red script:
Neptune taming a sea horse, thought a rarity / does not disturb the water's clarity.

After that, her worries about her father slipped to the back of her mind, from the joy of dream-walking. They visited an old farmhouse where a dog thrust its long nose through the screen door, farther in
every time; Finn and Clare were the photographs, watching down from the wall, as a dark little boy beat the dog's nose with a broom and cried for his mother.

As they walked from one dream to another, they talked over the dream-maps, and guessed at meanings. “You're doing well,” said Finn, “and it is so much harder with strangers. You'll get it, you'll find where the flag is, for sure.”

“Yes!” said Clare, a little guiltily, because the flag and the yew had fallen so far from her mind at the pleasure of walking through this world of dreams with Finn.
This feeling
, she thought,
this feeling of moving through someone else's dream
is strangely familiar.

They joined a crowd at the edge of a cliff, dancing to a dreadlocked band playing wooden flute and wild drums. Finn raised his arm in invitation, and when Clare took one hand, he rested the other on her waist and turned her expertly among the other dancers, so expertly that Clare, who was no dancer at all, felt herself light and easy with it. His hands felt so light and so firm against her, she thought she could lift into the sky. “You're good at this!” she said above the music.

He laughed. “I do love to dance. They say I get it from my father.”

They visited the dining room of a great ship, where a motherly woman was tapping on a porthole. All at once a huge black swordfish leaped through, then lay on her table, gasping and dying. Finn
and Clare were among the doctors the weeping woman called to set the fish right.

Clare next found herself drawn to the dream of a woman hanging from a tree from dozens of ropes around her arms and chest. Finn tugged her shirt to pull her away, but Clare moved closer. The woman was short and thick, with dark, gray-spattered hair, just curling in at her jaw. When she spoke, in a long string of firm and cheerful curses, Clare recognized the voice. If she was dreaming, then Jo was alive, oh, Jo was alive. As Clare was slipping away, with a heart so light she thought she might float, the curses slowed, and Jo's eyes widened.

“It's Clare,” said Jo. “Girl, are you away?”

“I don't know what you mean,” said Clare, abashed. You weren't supposed to let them see you.

“Away, among them. You are, I see you are,” said Jo. “Those that are away among them never return. Or if they do, they are not the same as they were before. If you come back at all, you will not be the same, Clare Macleod.”

Clare must have gone rather pale, for Jo smiled, her black eyes crinkling, even tied to a tree as she was. “Your mother was never the same, when she returned from away. She came back with the power.”

“What power?”

But then the dream faded away—Jo must have waked up—and Finn was pulling her away. Soon, at the site of a plane crash in a busy Indian city, they were among the passengers who walked laughing and unhurt from the wreckage.

In the midst of these dreams, Clare finally understood what it was that made them so familiar, why the sensation of strangers' dreams, which should have been alien and surreal, instead felt like home.

The dreams felt Strange. “Standing in someone else's dream” was exactly the feeling of a fairy-making.

And it came to her that fairy-makings were the dreams of fairies, the dreams of the Strange, because their makings were what they had for dreams. She saw that she had been walking through fairy dreams most of her life; that she was a dream-walking girl.

I can do it
, she thought,
I can walk through Balor's dream, and fool him, and save my father, even though I'm so afraid.

But perhaps she wasn't afraid enough.

The Teeth of the Wolf

When Clare and Finn reported back, Her of the Cliffs had said: “Before anything, she must sleep. After that we will see what she's learned, and whether she can make out where the flag might be.”

And Clare had concurred, had even exaggerated her drowsiness, with an enormous yawn, and
Yes, I'm so tired, please take me where I can sleep, far from the fairies, just to be safe, in case I forget to dream-awake, and let my dreams carry me away.

Finn had looked at her with pain in his eyes. She had all but winked back.

For Clare was clever, or so she thought. She planned to sleep, because she was tired indeed. But she meant to wake a little early, before Her of the Cliffs came for her, so that she could sneak off to enter Balor's dream. There she would trick him into leaving her father alone.

She was afraid, and she was brave, and she would not let her father be harmed.

In Her of the Cliffs's evergreen woods, under a fairy-made quilt colored in all of the thousand shades the sky can be, she slept. Sleeping, she dreamed she was in her California house, and a man
had come to their door dressed in a pirate costume, a parrot on his shoulder whose eye patch matched his own.
Oh, that's right, it's Halloween,
she thought in the dream,
that's why everything feels so Strange.

But in the dream the pirate forced his way into their house, and seized her father by the throat, and began to swing him around like a bat, smashing him against the furniture. She screamed, and her father cried out in pain, and from another room came a terrible, bestial bellow.

And she remembered:
This is only a dream, and it's your dream. Make it whatever you want.

“It's only Halloween,” she shouted at the pirate, “you're just a little kid.”

Obediently, the pirate shrank into a five-year-old, squalling for his mother. His parrot flapped out the door into the night, and her father sat on the floor, laughing and laughing, his eyes crinkling down at the corners.

She woke wild and sweating and proud.

But she had waked early, earlier than she knew; much too early. How could she know, with the half-light that hung eternal and unchanging around her, that she had only slept a single hour. She thought she had slept nearly a full night.

That was her first mistake.

She awoke knowing herself as a dream-walking girl, proud of her making skills. She wanted to show Finn, and show Her of the Cliffs, what she could do.
Your mother was never the same, when she returned from away. She came back with the power
, Jo had said. What power? Was it this power? She felt that perhaps nothing was beyond her now.

That was her second mistake.

She woke and saw, above her quilt-nest, a solitary bird on a branch. She saw the bird as a sign:
Now is the time.

And that was her third mistake.

“Bird,” she breathed, from beneath the quilt. It was a little gray titmouse with a black crest and an intelligent eye. She wriggled out softly until she was sitting cross-legged on top of the blankets. For a moment, sleep swept across her again, and she felt herself drifting away, but she shook her head, made a face, and sat up straight.

“Bird,” she said. “Please take me to Balor.”

The bird cocked its head toward her, as if inclining an ear, and Clare felt a sinking dread: that's right, she would have to make Balor, make the poem of him, the way she had her father. The idea of lingering in the essence of Balor made her sick. But she set her jaw and pressed on.

“Bird, listen,” she said. “I will tell you who he is.”

And sitting cross-legged on her quilt, her eyes closed, trusting the bird to stay, Clare spoke.

“He doesn't like
disobedient girls
,” she began. “When he leans in, he's a black mountain over you, and when his coat touches your arm you feel ashamed, and you want to scream.

“He wants to make sure he's safe from Finn, and he'll do anything to make sure he is, he doesn't care what worlds he ruins.

“He has black eyes, and one eye is dead, and it stares in one direction, never, ever moves from that one direction, just stares, like it's insane—like that one psycho eye is dragging the rest of him along with it. That's the feeling.

“His smile when he smiles is the opposite of a smile, it looks like a smile but it feels like a snarl, and that's such a weird feeling, that it looks like one thing and it feels like the opposite, it makes you want to throw up.”

“And that's such a weird feeling, it makes you want to throw up”—very poetic, Clare Macleod
, she thought bitterly:
glad Finn can't hear this.
And that reminded her.

“He makes you ashamed.” She was whispering now, but not too low for a bird. “Of your making, or of—of yourself, really. He makes you see how embarrassing and worthless you are.” Her voice was rising. “And he keeps a thing with him that
is
him—I saw it once made of fireflies and stars”—Who had sent that fairy-making? Had it been warning or threat?—“but really it's made of wood and paint, and it's
him
, somehow, this crazy eye, this open mouth, it's always him, it ruins sunsets and makes birds ugly and makes
you think your poems are worse than dirt, and it makes you so
ashamed
.”

Clare stopped talking. Her eyes were still shut. Her heart felt too big for her chest; it was climbing up into her throat.

Tiny claws on her shoulder; feather brushing her cheek.

“Oh, bird,” said Clare, “thank you.” Then: “Can you take me to his dream the fairy way? Can birds do that? Because it will take too long to walk.”

Balor's dream was hunger. His dream raged like an animal, cast around, tossed its head, looking for what to tear into. It was an angry, fearful hunger, a huge head swaying side to side, looking for what it will have in its belly, what it will eat, and crunch, and swallow. The oldest, most savage joy, the joy of
feeding
; and then, the different, sated, unregretting pleasure of
having fed
.

Inside Balor's dream was a wolf. It prowled a black and blasted ground, a ground that looked as if every living thing had been swept away by a wildfire. The wolf had eaten all, and was looking for more.

Clare stood, small and exposed, on this bleak landscape. The wolf was far from her, but not far enough; and if she felt terror, she also felt awe. A wolf is a creature of great beauty, although the beauty is not easy to see when you are prey.

The wolf raised its nose, sniffed, turned its nose in her direction, sniffed again.

So Clare ran. She ran past carcasses of half-devoured prey. In her terror, she knew with certainty that she could not do this, that it was too hard, and she should never have tried; that now she was trapped with a wolf on its way, and she would not survive.

With equal certainty, she knew:
maybe I can't do this, but I have to. I made the choice. I have to try.

In the distance, she saw—did she see? or did she
make
? she and Balor, making this place together—a house, black and smoking, and she ran for it.

A ravening hunger loped behind her.

The dream-house was burning. Clare knew that she could be hurt in this dream, badly and permanently, or even killed; but having no choice, she ran inside. She flew through flames and smoke, coughing, trying to see what Balor's mind-house might tell her.

Her mind flew even faster than her feet. She had to find an
underneath
. Surely her buried father would be
underneath
. When she saw what Balor's mind had made of him, she would know what to do.

She opened a door—a wall of flames. She opened another and choked on black smoke.

A snarl behind her. The wolf at the door.

She opened the last door to find stairs leading down.
Underneath
. Slamming the door behind her, she half tumbled down.

The basement walls were thick black dirt, and the floor was dirt beneath her. No window, but from somewhere, a dim and dirty light.

Silence.

And then, from a corner, a small skittering sound.

Clare knelt down, put her face to the ground.

A skittering near the wall, and the flash of a long gray ear, disappearing.

A hole in the floor, a rabbit inside it, quivering nose, terrified eyes.

This is how he sees my father.

A wild howl at the door above, a heavy, muscled body flung against it.

She had only so long, only seconds, perhaps, to decide: what could she become that would put Balor off this rabbit's scent, without making him see his dream had been invaded?

She thought of impersonating the rabbit herself, a furious rabbit with sharp, vicious teeth; but she also knew she would never defeat Balor in a physical battle, for the wolf was his true self, and a rabbit would be a false one to her.

She thought of becoming iron bars around the rabbit's hole. But iron bars did not belong here, and would make Balor realize that someone else was in his dream: another mind, another maker.

She thought of becoming an escaping rabbit—
see, it's gone, too late, forget about it.
But that would incite the wolf into a chase, which it would likely win.

All these ideas had flashed through her mind, had been discarded, in the few seconds before the door above burst open. She heard the wet, slavering sniff of a wolf seeking its prey.

Sniffing. Smell.

She knew what she must become; and she became it.

The wolf made its way down the stairs, shoulders rolling, tongue hanging out, tasting the air. But as it walked toward the rabbit hole, the wolf stopped. It curled its lip and backed up as if struck.

Before the rabbit hole lay the rabbit, dead—quite dead,
already dead
—and not freshly dead, either, but long dead, putrid, rotten, and inedible.

The wolf whined in disappointment, tossing its head back and forth to rid itself of the smell. Then it wound its way slowly up the stairs.

The dead rabbit lay still and rotting on the floor. Inside the dead rabbit lay a very alive girl whose heart was beating wild and hard.

She knew she could not for long fool Balor into believing her father was dead, not with nothing but a dream. But she hoped that she could imprint on Balor's mind somehow a new story: that her father was
not for eating
; that he will
make you sick.
Leave him, leave him, forget him.
He is not prey.

So maybe the next time Balor thought of her father, buried in the mine, and made a plan, or even just licked his lips—maybe something deep inside him would feel nauseated, would sicken, would think—not today. Forget him for today.

Clare waited to be sure Balor's prowling wolf-consciousness was gone. Her plan was to then slip out as something small and hard to see, an ant, a night-moth, something beneath attention. Her heartbeat slowed, inside the rotting rabbit. It would be all right. She had done it. It would be all right. Her father was safe—he was dead to Balor now. And she was safe. She had done it.

Drowsily, she remembered her father's face from his dream, old and young, and how he told her he kept the flag
in the sky, it's one of the stories in the sky.
And it came to her—she almost laughed out loud—oh, I see: not sky,
Skye
. And suddenly she knew the flag was in the house after all, and she even knew exactly where it was. She could find the flag, and save the fairy roads, just as she had saved her father. All the fighting was over now, everything was as right and well as ever could be.

Rocked on those lulling, beautiful words, the girl who had barely slept in days fell fast, fast asleep, and began to dream.

But she was not dreaming inside her own safe home, or under Finn's careful eye. And because she was so exhausted, she was not dreaming awake and aware.

She was dreaming asleep inside the mind of Balor of the Evil Eye, and when she arose from the floor in her true shape, still dreaming, and walked through the burning house, that eye fell hard upon her.