“What’s going on here?”
Bethina looked up at me and blinked rapidly. “Oh, Miss Aoife. Thank goodness you’re back.”
“He’s been like this for a few days now,” Cal said quietly. “He’s fine as far as we can tell. He’s just … asleep.”
“Don’t know why, or how,” Conrad said, shutting the door and standing in front of it like an ill-tempered guard. “We’ve tried everything to wake him up, but he won’t react to anything. Until the nightmares come.”
Bethina nodded, her eyes wide. “Then he gets to screaming something awful. Noises like I never heard a man make.”
I turned on Conrad. “How could this happen?” My brother was the one acting like the leader of men. He could at least tell me how such a thing could be possible. My father wasn’t the sort to be caught by surprise, either by magic or by malady. He was strong—the strongest person I knew.
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Conrad snapped. “One minute he was fine, the next Arkham was going crazy, and the next he was like this.”
Bethina moved aside to make room for me, and I took my father’s hand. It was dry and cool, the hand of a patient rather than that of the strong man I knew my father to be. I felt the urge to cry, or scream, bubbling in my throat. I couldn’t be sure which it was.
“I think you better start from the beginning,” I said to Conrad. “Tell me exactly what’s happened since I’ve been gone.”
He sat next to me on the edge of the bed, but my father didn’t stir even as the mattress shifted under my brother’s weight. Conrad smoothed the blankets, adjusted the pillows and spoke without looking at anyone.
“It happened right after you left,” he said. “People started falling asleep and not waking up. Or they’d dream so vividly they’d think it was actually happening and they’d do things like walk into traffic or attack their loved ones.”
“The Proctors tried to control it and set up more quarantines,” Cal added, “but they’ve lost a lot of power. There’s all sorts of investigations by the government into their conduct, and without Draven, individual offices have pretty much gone off and done what they liked.”
“Riots in some places,” said Bethina, “and others are on total lockdown. Arkham pretty much got cleaned out, folks taken off to quarantine, after a bad rash of dreamers swept through and tried to light the place on fire.”
“Same thing happened on Cape Cod,” Conrad said. “Proctors were everywhere. Valentina decided to split up from us and try to find help, sympathetic folks in the Brotherhood of Iron, and she made me responsible for getting Dad back here, where he’d be safe.”
I squeezed my father’s hand. This was worse than I ever could have imagined. I’d been warned there were consequences to what I’d done to try to reverse the Fae’s deception and save my mother, but I’d never imagined that they would be so direct, so tangible. That they would hurt my father.
“How long has he been like this? And having the dreams?” I said.
“Nightmares, more like,” Conrad confirmed. “He thrashes and screams—it got so bad last night we had to hold him down. It started right after you left. Valentina found him on the floor of his study, asleep. Nothing on this earth could rouse him, and she tried everything, believe me.”
“It’s an epidemic,” Bethina said quietly. “All over the country. People goin’ to sleep and not wakin’ up for love or money.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to my father. I didn’t know if my being there could have prevented this, but the plain truth was I hadn’t been. Hadn’t been thinking of anyone except myself and the thin hope that I could get Dean back and put things right via some vague notion fed to me by my mother. She was insane, and by believing her, I was probably just as crazy and desperate in my own way.
My father would be ashamed of me. In that moment, I was ashamed of me.
“Can we talk outside?” I said to Conrad, and he looked as if he’d rather do anything but. “Please?” I insisted. Conrad nodded, and I’d never been so relieved to leave a room as when we stepped from the oppressive shadows back into the weak sunlight of the mist-laden day.
We walked in silence the entire length of the lawn and sat on a stone bench by the reflecting pond, the bench covered with moss and pockmarks from decades, if not centuries, of weather. It mirrored the pond, choked with algae and lily pads, speckled with the crimson shards of fallen leaves floating on the surface.
“What was it like?” Conrad said abruptly. He didn’t look at me, just at the water, which rippled as something—a turtle or one of the ancient koi that lurked below the pads—surfaced to snatch at a late-season insect.
“Thorn?” I said. “Boring, mostly. Fae are very stuffy, and very odd. I spent a lot of time with Mother.”
“No,” Conrad said quietly. “Being with her—our mother.”
I thought about that. I’d seen flashes of the old Nerissa, the one who told us stories, took us on walks to search for flowers between cracks in Lovecraft’s sidewalks, let us watch clouds in the park for hours on end rather than going home and tending to things like chores and homework, but mostly I’d seen the new Nerissa, no longer mad, but wholly Fae.
“It was disappointing,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell Conrad about the parts that had been all right, the evenings when we’d sit quietly, just spending time together. Conrad felt abandoned and lost, and I didn’t blame him.
“Then why did you go with her?”
I dug my fingers into the bench, nails carving crescents into the moss and lichen. “I had to, Conrad. She promised me a way to find Dean.”
Conrad turned and stared at me. It was a stare of pure pity, as if he hadn’t realized I was ill and I’d just told him I was terminal.
“Aoife,” he said carefully. “Dean is dead.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped. “I just want to be home and not talk about Thorn anymore.” I prayed that Conrad would drop the Dean business, and thankfully he did. Trying to explain I was still looking for a way to the Deadlands would just get him thinking my iron poisoning was back, that I was mad.
“It’s been weird since you left,” he said. “All around. Things are happening—it’s almost like an epidemic. Dreams. Madness. The president might have to sit for an impeachment hearing, and the Rationalists are having a fit. It’s like when things were wild all over again.”
Something clicked into place, what the old woman had shouted at me earlier. “Somebody called me a demon this morning,” I said. “A demon from hell. Nobody talks like that. I mean, if they want to stay out of Rationalist jail.”
“Ever since people started falling asleep and the Proctors got stripped of their authority, a lot of that’s been happening,” Conrad said. “I’ve heard rumors that all sorts of creatures are cropping up. People who don’t know the truth blame the necrovirus, but it sounds to me like the barriers between Thorn and Iron and … other places are easier to get past.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It could all just be mass hysteria. People thinking the world is ending.”
“It’s not ending,” I said quietly. “But this isn’t nothing.” I looked Conrad in the eye. He had our mother’s eyes, pale blue and cloudless, like a new sky after rain. I looked more like my father, both in coloring and features.
Conrad frowned. “Aoife, what are you not telling me?”
I looked up at the sky, at the mist that roiled above our heads like a sea, ancient and birthing primordial creatures onto a phantom shore.
What I’d seen in the Arctic, in the space where dreams were born, had been real. That much was clear to me now.
I told Conrad the truth then, there in the garden. About how I’d tried to reverse what I’d done because of Tremaine, step back through the loopholes of time and undo the damage I’d done to the Lovecraft Engine and the city. How it hadn’t worked, and how I’d snapped something fundamental in the gears of the worlds, Thorn and Iron and everything in between.