He saw a young man in the narrow dorm bed below, motionless but nonetheless looking as if he spoiled for a fight. Between his brows, two knitted lines formed the universal symbol for I’ll fuck you up. His eyes were open, looking at nothing. Adam was slotted between him and the wall, mouth parted with abandon, hair wild against the pillow.
They were completely covered with monsters.
Their bodies were weighted with peculiar creatures that looked sort of like horseshoe crabs at first blush. A closer look revealed that instead of hard shells, they had dramatic masks, with little mouths snapping open and shut hungrily on their backs. Perfectly shaped cow teeth filled each mouth.
The crabs looked nightmarish and wrong, because they were nightmarish and wrong. They were a species that hadn’t existed until Ronan woke up. They were a species that only existed because Ronan had woken up.
This was what it meant to be Ronan Lynch.
Dream to reality.
They seethed and milled slowly, pulling the sheets into swirly patterns with their small, rigid legs.
Adam didn’t move because his hearing ear was buried in the pillow and his perpetually exhausted body was lost to sleep.
Ronan couldn’t move. He was always paralyzed for a few minutes after he successfully brought something back from a dream. It was as if he swapped those minutes of wakeful capability in his dreams for a few minutes of somnolent uselessness. There was no way to speed it up, either, no matter how threatening the circumstances were when he woke. He could only float like this, outside his body, watching the dreams do whatever they wanted to do without his interference.
Adam, he thought, but couldn’t say it.
Sclack, sclack. The crabs’ monstrous little mouths sounded wet as they opened and closed, just as they had when he saw them beneath the bridge in his dream. Dream things didn’t change their stripes in the waking world. If they disobeyed the laws of physics in the dream, like a piece of wood that hovered just above the ground, they continued to disobey them when brought into real life. If they were an abstract concept made flesh in the dream, like a song that could somehow be scooped up in your hands, the peculiar, brain-bending quality of the thing persisted into waking.
If they were murder crabs that wanted to eat you in the dream, they kept on wanting to eat you in waking life.
Sclack, sclack.
Ronan attempted to wiggle his toes. Nothing. All he could do was float over his own body and wait. Fortunately, the crabs’ mask-mouths were on their backs, so for the moment, Ronan and Adam were safe.
For the moment.
Adam.
He willed Adam to wake.
A few crabs fell from the bed with a clatter, their little legs tapping away on the floorboards. It was an off-putting sound that perfectly matched their appearance. Sclack, sclack, skitter, skitter.
Shit, and now Ronan saw that he had not brought back only the crabs. The floating bridge had come back as well, hovering right beside the bed like a rustic skateboard. And the pretty little motorcycle sat in the middle of the room between the two dorm beds. It was running, just as it had been in the dream, a little intense puff of exhaust twirling behind it.
He’d brought every single damn thing in sight.
How had he fucked up so badly?
Sclack, sclack.
That other dreamer—Bryde—had put him off his game.
The other dreamer. Other dreamer. Ronan had nearly forgotten. It seemed impossible to forget something of such magnitude, but that was the way of dreams, wasn’t it? Even the best and worst of them could dissipate from memory immediately. Now it flooded back to him.
Ronan needed another dreamer like he needed a shit-ton of murder crabs in his bed.
The only mercy was that the other dorm bed was still empty. Ronan didn’t know if Adam had arranged for his roommate to be gone overnight or if it was a fortunate coincidence, but he was grateful. Now he just needed to be able to move.
One of the murder crabs scuttled up Adam’s body toward his deaf ear.
Wake up, Adam, wake up.
Ronan had the hideous thought that they’d already killed Adam and that was why he didn’t rise, because he was already dead and cooling, murdered by Ronan’s dreams while he floated helplessly overhead—
One of the murder crabs scuttled onto Ronan’s face, each crisp leg an unpleasant pressure point. Quite suddenly, he saw it from his physical body instead of from above, so control was returning to his body. There was a barcode on the crab’s belly, and in small letters above it TCP MIXED NUTS 1101, and below that, a set of blinking blue eyes with really full eyelashes. The 1101 was for his birthday, which was nigh, the big old one-nine, but God knew why the rest was there. Ronan Lynch’s subconscious was a jungle.
Another crab collided into the first, flipping one of the terrors onto its back. Mouth side down. It went for his eye.
Fuckity fuck.
For a brief moment, he could imagine the next few minutes laid out: the crab snapping through his eye, his mouth unable to shout or even whimper, him silently losing half his sight as Adam lay beside him, sleeping or dead.
But then he could move, he could move, his whole body was his again.
Kicking off the blankets, he tipped as many of the crabs as he could off him and Adam. The little horrors rolled and skittled off the bed, some of them landing on the hovering board beside it. The force of the movement sent the board rocketing across the room, a floating crab taxi, before it hit the wall and dislodged them all.
“Oh God,” Adam said.
He had been sleeping, not dead, and now his face reflected the truth: that he’d woken to a hell-room of crustacean roommates.
“God, Ronan, God! What did you do?”
“I’m fixing it.” Ronan slid out of bed.
Slam.
As Ronan cast for a weapon, he saw that Adam had smashed one against the wall with a biology text. Its insides shot out—yellow glop like the inside of a squashed caterpillar.
This worked the rest of the creatures to frenzy.
“Fix it faster,” Adam said.
The hoverboard bobbed close; Ronan leapt on it. The momentum sent him rocketing to the corner of the dorm room, slamming up against the wall, but he kept his balance. Giving the wall a shove, he shot to the other corner instead, where a flag was leaned. He lifted it high, wielding it like a gallant Irish hero of old.
Slam. Adam smashed another, and another.
Ronan stabbed a crab with his makeshift lance. It pierced right through the barcode.
“Gotcha, you hungry bastards,” Ronan told them.
Another crab landed on his arm; he smashed it against the wall and impaled it just as quick. Another flipped onto its back; he stabbed it through the barcode. Stomp, stomp, flick. More slime. Slam. Slam. Adam was killing the ones by the bed. It had a certain gruesome satisfaction.
There was a knocking on the door.
It was unclear how long it had been going on. Only now with all the crabs dead was it quiet enough to hear.
Adam looked at Ronan, horrified.
“The bed,” Ronan hissed. “Put them under the covers for now.”
The knocking continued.
“Just a second!” Adam said.
The two of them furiously scraped a mound of gloppy crab corpses under the comforter. Ronan shoved the hoverboard beneath the bed, where it pressed up tightly against the mattress, desperate for flight.
Adam went to the door. Out of breath, he opened it a crack. “Yeah?”
“Adam Parrish,” Fletcher’s plummy voice said. “What the hell is going on? They’re gonna call the proctor.”