Reverie Page 12

  TO: Kane Montgomery

  WHAT: You are cordially invited to attend tea for two.

  WHERE: 147 Carmel Street

  There was no signature, but scrawled at the bottom was a line of glossy black ink. When Kane brushed his thumb over it, the looping letters smudged.

  It read:

  Kane shot down Carmel Street on his bike, zipping past Victorian houses converted into boutique offices and salons. As he approached downtown, the thick foliage broke apart to admit denser developments that lost their character and melded together like braced teeth. He was sure the invitation was Dean’s next clue, just like Dean had passed him the photo in the same journal. The address on the invitation was the library. He wondered if Dean liked books. Maybe they liked the same books.

  Right now.

  Kane had left in a rush, but not before dirtying some dishes and penning a note about some early morning tutoring. He knew Sophia would see through this, so he’d texted her. Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ll tell you everything.

  Then he’d turned off his phone and hoped she didn’t call the police.

  Kane banked through gentle curves, the pale morning rising over him and growing thick with birdsong, heat, and the chatter of insects. When the library came into view he stopped short. It was covered in construction materials. A fence lined with green canvas bordered the property, and plastic curtains had been pulled over most of the windows. Through them the library looked empty, a gutted shell of Kane’s memory.

  The invitation hummed in his pocket. Around him the chorus of cicadas swelled, urging him forward, except suddenly his secret investigation didn’t feel like so much fun.

  Still, as imperfect as this plan might be, it was his.

  He stashed his bike in a towering mountain laurel, then snuck through the vacant construction grounds. Except for the cicadas, it was eerily quiet. Opaque curtains hung in the entryway, billowing outward in methodic exhales, and the interior beyond was impenetrably dark.

  Kane pulled on Ursula’s flannel. He wondered if he should at least text Ursula the address in case he vanished, but decided he couldn’t risk turning on his phone. Setting his jaw, he plunged inside.

  The library had been constructed around an open expanse topped with a skylight that usually saturated every inch of the space with sunlight. Kane’s memory of the space was therefore a riot of oranges and yellows that burned the floating dust in the air to glitter.

  The library Kane stood in now was a betrayal to that memory. The skylight had been covered with a tarp, and the sunlight that plunged through the gaps looked almost solid enough to bump into. Only a few bits of dust rocked in and out of the light, like insects. Otherwise, the air was unmoving.

  There were no books. Just stripped wood and wires.

  But there was noise. A distant chiming in the emptiness, somewhere above Kane. He closed his eyes to listen. When he reopened them, he was not alone.

  A dog sat in a spotlight, sleek and black, with cropped ears poised like horns. A Doberman with a fine silver chain for a collar. It watched Kane with urgent eyes, whined, and then trotted toward the stairs. Kane followed obediently, climbing up two stories until he found the dog waiting at the top.

  Before the construction, the library’s top floor was reserved for the boring adult books. Now the top floor was a huge open room, barely lit by a grid of blacked-out skylights. Some of the skylights had shed their tarps and the effect was the underside of a pond rocking in slow motion. It lent a murky translucence to the emptiness that was, Kane noticed, not empty at all.

  In the middle of the expanse was a room without walls. It glowed warmly, like a spotlighted scene on an empty, black stage. There was an ivory settee lounging across from a stiff and prim wingback chair. Between them sat a mahogany coffee table complete with a gleaming tray of porcelain teacups, saucers, and a teapot. Steam curled up from the pot’s pursed lips, disappearing into a chandelier that blazed with a thousand crystal facets. Kane approached, transfixed. It wasn’t until he was nearly beneath the chandelier that he sensed something about it: its light pulsed, as though alive.

  Then something among the scene moved. Like an octopus unraveling from coral, an entire person shifted into focus on the settee as they stood up. The camouflage of their brocade robe against the settee was uncanny. Chills broke out across Kane’s neck. He did not recognize who he saw; he recognized what he heard.

  “Did you know,” said Dr. Poesy, the very one who had given Kane the red journal in the Soft Room, “that the female anglerfish evolved a dark lining in its digestive system so the consumption of glowing morsels would not expose it from the inside out to its prey?”

  Kane’s eyes flicked up to the chandelier again.

  “They live in the dark, you know,” he added. “They’re from the abyss.”

  Dr. Poesy was different from Kane’s memory. Standing against the drabness, with his lustrous robe pooling around his shoulders, he radiated with pastel power. The skin of his face glowed beneath rose and peach makeup. His hair had gone from chestnut to a pearly lavender, pushed up high and backward and threaded with pearls—a wig, Kane knew. The edge of something chiffon fluttered out from where the rope fell open.

  Was Dr. Poesy in drag?

  “Yes, she is in drag,” Dr. Poesy said, once again answering the questions that were plain on Kane’s face. Kane controlled himself, blinking away his wonder.

  “Anyways. Isn’t that interesting?” she asked. “About the fish, I mean? I learned that today. It’s a blessing to learn something new every day, but you’d have to inhabit a small world indeed not to. Isn’t that right, Ms. Daisy?”

  Dr. Poesy reached out a hand, and the dog lapped at the long fingers. She stroked the animal lovingly.

  “Doesn’t Ms. Daisy make a fine escort? I’ve always told her she could make a lot of money if she weren’t so picky.” She sat, crossing bare, toned legs, and motioned for Kane to do the same. Her high heels were monstrous.

  “You’re not a doctor, are you?” Kane blurted.

  “Well, no, not in the conventional sense.”

  “Do you have a doctorate degree?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any degrees?”

  Poesy—not Doctor, just Poesy then—looked affronted. “Of course.”

  “In what?”

  “Parapsychic Architectures and what you people might call physics, but I don’t see what that has to do—”

  “What do you mean ‘you people’?”

  “Americans.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Not here.”

  “Be specific.”

  Poesy tapped a knifelike nail against her rosy cheek, smiling slyly. “The abyss.”

  Kane forced the edge out of his voice. “Well then what are you doing here?”

  “Having tea. I thought I wrote that on the invitation. Would you like to join me?” Poesy slid off her robe and draped it over the settee, rendering her visible in a shimmering, beaded corset. Around one wrist she wore a bracelet laden with a dozen charms that clinked as she fussed. Kane found himself moving closer to inspect them. He spotted an opalescent skull, a copper starfish, a white wooden key.

  He sat down.

  There was also a small pewter pine cone. A fat porcelain bee.

  “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the place. As you can see, I have prioritized our privacy.”

  Kane blinked at the tea service of priceless, bone-white china beneath a dizzying lace of gold. Poesy picked up her own cup and used a little silver spoon to stir the tea into a small whirlpool.

  Silver on porcelain. It was such a tiny sound. Kane wondered how he had heard it two stories below.

  “You’ll have some tea, won’t you? We have quite a bit to discuss and not much time to do so, but there’s no sense in dispensing with deportment. We
aren’t barbarians, are we?” Poesy chuckled knowingly as she filled Kane’s cup.

  “You know about the reveries?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “What do you know?”

  “A lot.”

  “What are they?”

  “Very dangerous.”

  Poesy’s answers only spawned more questions, like mushrooms shedding spores. Kane shoved down his curiosity, knowing it was useless to expect a drag queen to do anything other than exactly what she wanted. From his limited knowledge, he knew drag queens often lip-synched to songs as bars full of cheering people fought to give them money. Kane didn’t have any cash, and he didn’t think Poesy would accept it anyway. He’d just have to let her perform her way, or no way at all, and so he shut up and sat back.

  Poesy raised her teacup. Kane did the same. Together they sipped. The tea was infused with rose, and it buzzed like electricity in Kane’s stomach.

  “Mr. Montgomery,” Poesy began. “What do you know of etherea?”

  Etherea. The word was new to Kane, but it hung in his mind like a faceted gem, a feeling of familiarity emanating from its cut ridges and refracted depths. Kane whispered it to himself, feeling as though it ought to whisper back.

  “Mr. Montgomery, I want you to think of reality as a cloth, lushly embroidered with everything you see in this world. Just layer upon layer of elaborate, incredible design. And if reality is a cloth, it must be woven from something, yes?”

  “Like thread?”

  Poesy licked her small silver spoon. “Like thread. Like etherea: the magic of creation, the magic that makes real the unreal. All things—reality around us, and the reveries you traverse, even other magics—are woven from etherea. Even this charming little town is a well-formed design. Stable and self-assured, it ought to exist for a good long time.”

  After another sip, Poesy’s eyes darkened.

  “Or it won’t. That’s the thing about etherea; it’s a terrifically erratic magic, making and unmaking worlds in the blink of an eye. And that’s what’s happening in this town. A well of etherea has sprung up, and the excess magic is now everywhere, and restless. It must take shape. To do so, it has started using people with uniquely vast minds, casting its power through the prism of their imaginations and creating their interior worlds as entirely new realities.” Poesy considered her own words. “Though they’re not very good realities, are they? Oh, well, I suppose there’s nothing to be done about other people’s bad taste.”

  Kane fought to digest Poesy’s words. It was like chewing potpourri. His mind turned to the unraveling last night, and that horrible reverie. He still felt the echoes of its anguish, its chaotic fury at having come undone. It had wanted to survive, and it would have killed to do so. Kane’s teacup clattered in his saucer as he began to shiver. He didn’t want to drink any more.

  “So what you’re saying…” Kane fumbled his way through a question that had only just begun to take shape. “Is that etherea is manifesting peoples’ dreams?”

  “Dreams!” Poesy grimaced around the word, like it was caked in salt. “Such deeply impractical things. I won’t suffer the association. No. The phenomenon of the localized paracosm, or what you have shorthanded to reverie, could never originate with something as ephemeral as the dream. No. They come from the depth, the core, the marrow of the mind. The subconscious! The subcontinent, made real in phantasmagoric majesty!”

  This monologue seemed very prepared. Kane let Poesy finish, gave a respectful and wide-eyed nod, and then countered with: “But this is impossible.”

  “Improbable,” she corrected.

  “I mean it’s unbelievable. Like, unreal.”

  “So what?” Poesy snapped. “The unreality of something is no reason to dismiss it. Sometimes reveries—and dreams for that matter—are more real to a person than the reality they serve to distract from. I would expect you of all people to understand that.”

  Poesy’s tone was cutting, such a fine blade that it was beneath Kane’s skin before he even saw it flash. But he kept his chin up, and his eyes on her. “I do understand that. What I meant is that these reveries shouldn’t be here. They’re wrong.”

  Poesy’s frigid stare broke into a laugh that filled the empty library, and Kane finally took a breath.

  “You’re certainly right about that.” She smiled, refilling his cup. “Reveries are beautiful and interesting things, but they have no place in Reality Proper. In fact, they must be unraveled at all costs or else they might punch a hole through Reality Proper. You can’t have two realities layered one over the other for long without consequences. That’s just the physics of friction, just the math of it all. And see? I told you I had a degree.” Taking note of Kane’s rising shock, she added, “Oh, but don’t worry. With luck, you and your friends have prevented that outcome by diligently unraveling the reveries as they spawn. So, kudos.”

  “But why us?”

  Her smile turned to awe. “Lucidity, darling. It’s rare—this ability you four share to resist the hypnotizing effects of being in a different reality. I share it, too. We are all people between worlds.”

  “But what about the powers? Elliot can create illusions. Ursula can throw cars. Adeline can…”

  He couldn’t say it, even now. Poesy shrugged, like these details were as common as personality traits.

  “Just like the heroes of your reveries, you each are a prism. Etherea shines through your dark depths, and it produces power. The difference is that you are awake to your power and able to regulate it. It’s quite a privilege.” Her eyes drifted to Kane’s burns. “Though while some power comes free, the pursuit of more power always comes at a price.”

  Blood burned in Kane’s cheeks. The Others had told him he’d gotten those burns while hunting for some mysterious weapon.

  “You already knew what happened to Maxine Osman, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I wanted you to find out for yourself.”

  “What about the police investigation? What about Detective Thistler?”

  “I’ve dealt with them. And I will continue to deal with them and protect you, though I must ask that you help me in return.”

  Kane’s head spun, his mind sagging in the honeyed vapor of the tea. He had to focus on Poesy’s bracelet to keep himself steady.

  “What do you want?”

  Poesy feigned a bashful smile, as though she had not guided the conversation to this exact point.

  “Haven’t you wondered for yourself where etherea comes from? Haven’t you found yourself dreaming of its source? Such power it must hold, to unleash all manner of dreams, delusions, nightmares, and whims into our suffering reality. Whatever and wherever this source is, I’d consider it very dangerous in the wrong hands.”

  Poesy sipped her tea, looking pointedly at Kane’s own hands.

  Kane ceased all fidgeting.

  “A weapon,” Kane said. He knew what came next. More accusations about what he’d done and who he’d been.

  “Weapon!” Poesy laughed. “Weapons only destroy, my dear. Instruments, however, both destroy and create. That’s what makes them so powerful. The holy grail, Pandora’s box, the genie’s lamp; all were sources of etherea. If you look, really look, history is full of instruments that make the unreal real, that call forth power from nothing.” She toyed with a stray pearl caught in the hair around her temple. “These instruments are called looms for their ability to weave new worlds from the imaginations of mortals. I have spent my whole existence hunting them down, one by one, to ensure they are not abused.”

  Poesy had said the reveries were a local phenomenon. A new one. Kane put the pieces together one by one.

  “And that’s why you’re here? You think there’s a loom hidden in East Amity?”

  Pleased, Poesy dipped her cup at Kane.

  “Yes. The loom, by the scale of its power. A crown-shaped
instrument I believe you’ve summoned once already. Tell me about it, Mr. Montgomery.”

  “You think…” Kane fought the spinning vacancy spreading through his body. He vaguely remembered the Others telling him he had been searching for a source of power—a loom, maybe—and he had found a deadly crown. The actual symbol of power. But it was gone, cast away into the river or something. “I don’t know where it is, if that’s what you think. I don’t know how to get it back.”

  Poesy exhaled, blowing curls of steam toward Kane. “Perhaps you don’t know now, but think, Mr. Montgomery: What do you find yourself so suddenly without?”

  The answer rose up through Kane like a bubble breaking calm water. “My memories.”

  Poesy’s eyes glinted. “How inconvenient. Memories interest me, you know. In a way, you explored the very memory of this town through Maxine Osman, who spent her life perfecting its rendering.” Poesy shrugged. “Her world must have been lovely. I wonder what you saw, and I wonder what you learned. But mostly, I wonder what must a person discover to make them dangerous enough to be hurt in the way you have been hurt. What power is deserving of such a thorough and vicious suppression?” She shrugged again, her downcast eyes sliding up to meet his. “A loom seems like just the inspiration for that caliber of evil, and we only know one person with the means.”

  Kane’s breath halted as his hand traced the raised flesh of his burns. He had found the loom, and then he had been betrayed. It had to have been Adeline. Adeline was the one who had dug into his head and scooped out his memories. She said she’d done it to save him. Ursula and Elliot had agreed. Did they know, or had she brainwashed them, too?

  A raw helplessness opened in Kane. It was hard to hold Poesy’s gaze with tears in his eyes. “What do I do?”

  Not a hint of haughtiness touched Poesy’s voice now.

  “You be brave, Mr. Montgomery. You face the reveries, you recover the loom, and you deliver it to me safely. Together, we will save reality from this plague of fantasy and ruin.”

  Kane thought again of the barbarians with their frost-white eyes. The split lips of the altar, vomiting forth unfathomable beasts.