Some of the animals were real. Most of the deer were ordinary Virginia whitetails, fed and tamed by Ronan for no purpose other than delight. Their domestication had been aided by the presence of a dreamt buckling that lived among them. He was pale and lovely, with long, tremulous eyelashes and foxy red ears. Now, he was the first to accept Ronan’s offering of the salt block as he rolled it into the field, and he allowed Ronan to stroke the short, coarse fur of his withers and worry some burrs out of the soft hair behind his ears. One of the wild deer nibbled pellets from Ronan’s cupped palms, and the rest stood patiently as he poured it into the grass. Probably it was illegal to feed them. Ronan could never remember what was legal to feed or shoot in Virginia.
The smaller animals crept closer, some pawing at his boots, some alighting on the grass near him, others spooking the deer. He scattered pellets for them, too, and inspected them for wounds and ticks.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
He thought about what he wanted the skin armour to look like. Maybe it didn’t have to be invisible. Maybe it could be silver. Maybe it could have lights.
Ronan grinned at the thought, feeling suddenly silly and lazy and foolish. He stood, letting the day’s failure roll off his shoulders and fall to the ground. As he stretched, the white buckling lifted his head to observe him keenly. The others noted the buckling’s attention and likewise focused their gaze. They were beautiful in a way that Ronan’s dreams could be, the way Cabeswater could be, only now he was awake. Somehow, without Ronan marking the moment, the schism between his waking life and dreaming life had begun to narrow. Although half of this strange herd would fall asleep if Ronan died, so long as he was here, so long as he breathed in and breathed out, he was a king.
He left his bad mood in the field.
Back in the house, he dreamed.
The forest was Ronan.
He was lying on his face in the dirt, his arms outstretched, his fingers digging down into the soil for the ley line’s energy. He smelled leaves burning and falling, death and rebirth. The air was his blood. The voices muttering to him from the branches were his own, tracked over themselves. Ronan, looped; Ronan, again; Ronan, again.
“Get up,” the Orphan Girl said in Latin.
“No,” he replied.
“Are you trapped?” she asked.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I do.”
He looked at her, somehow, although he was still all tangled up in his root-fingers and the ink branches growing from the tattoo on his bare back. Orphan Girl stood with a feed bucket in her hands. Her eyes were dark and sunken, the eyes of the always hungry or the always wanting. Her white skullcap was pulled down low over her honey-blond pixie cut.
“You’re just a piece of dream,” he told her. “You’re just some kind of subfuckery of my imagination.”
She whimpered like a kicked puppy, and he immediately felt cross with her, or himself. Why shouldn’t he just say what she was?
“I was looking for you before,” he said, because he’d just remembered this. Her presence kept reminding him, again and again, that he was in a dream.
“Kerah,” she said, still hurt by his earlier statement. Ronan was annoyed to hear her steal Chainsaw’s name for him.
“Find your own,” he said, but he’d lost the taste for being firm with her, even if it was just honesty. She sat beside him, pulling her knees up to her chest.
Pressing his cheek against the cool soil, he stretched further into the earth. His fingertips brushed grubs and earthworms, moles and snakes. The grubs uncurled as he passed them. The earthworms joined him in his journey. The moles’ fur pressed against him. The snakes coiled around his arms. He was all of them.
He sighed.
Aboveground, Orphan Girl rocked and sang a little lament to herself, looking anxiously up at the sky.
“Periculosum,” she warned. “Suscitat.”
He didn’t feel any danger, though. Just earth, and the ley’s energy, and the branches of his veins. Home, home.
“It’s down here,” he said. The dirt swallowed his words and sent up new shoots.
Orphan Girl hunched her back up against his leg and shivered. “Quid —” she began, then continued, stumbling, in English, “What is it?”
It was a skin. Shimmering, nearly transparent. Enough of him was below the surface of the forest that he could see the shape of it among the dirt. It was fashioned like a body, like it was germinating beneath the ground, like it was waiting to be dug free. The fabric of it felt like the cloth of the bag in Matthew’s room.
“I have it,” Ronan said, his fingers brushing the surface. Help me hold it. He might have only thought it, not said it out loud.
Orphan Girl began to cry. “Watch out, watch out.”
She had barely finished saying it when he felt …
Something
Some
one?
It was not the cool, dry scales of the snakes. Nor the warm, rapid heartbeats of the moles. It was not the moving-dirt-softness of earthworms or the smooth, slow flesh of the grubs.
It was dark.
It seeped.
It was not so much a thing as not a thing.
Ronan did not wait. He knew a nightmare when he felt it.
“Girl,” he said, “pull me out.”
He snatched the dream skin in one of his root-hands, rapidly trying to commit the feeling of it to memory. The weight, the density, the realness.
Orphan Girl was pawing at the soil around him, burrowing like a dog, making frightened little noises. How she hated his dreams.
The darkness that was not darkness crept up through the dirt. It was eating the things it touched. Or rather, they were there, and then they were not.
“Faster,” Ronan snapped, retreating with the skin clutched in his root fingers.
He could leave the dream skin behind and wake himself up.
He didn’t want to leave it. It could work.
Orphan Girl had a hold of his leg, or his arm, or one of his branches, and she was pulling, pulling, pulling, trying to unearth him.
“Kerah,” she wept.
The darkness gnawed up. If it got ahold of Ronan’s hand, he might wake up without one. He was going to have to cut his losses —
Orphan Girl fell back, tugging him free of the soil. The blackness burst up through the ground behind him. Without thinking, Ronan threw himself over the girl protectively.
Nothing is impossible, said the forest, or the darkness, or Ronan.
He woke. He was trapped in place, as he always was after he brought something of any size from a dream. He couldn’t feel his hands – please, he thought, please let me still have hands – and he couldn’t feel his legs – please, he thought, please let me still have legs. He spent several long minutes staring up at the ceiling. He was in the living room on the old plaid couch, looking at the same three cracks that had made the letter M for years. Everything smelled of hickory and boxwood. Chainsaw flapped over him before settling heavily on his left leg.
So he must at least still have one leg.
He couldn’t quite formulate what had made the darkness so terrifying, now that he wasn’t looking at it.
Slowly, his fingers began to move, so he must still have them, too. The dream skin had come with him and was draped halfway off the couch. It was gauzy and insubstantial looking, stained with dirt and ripped to shreds. He had his limbs, but the suit was a wash. He was also starving.