The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [86]
In spite of my mind whirling, the day of discovery proved stronger, and sleep was a fast and true partner.
The madness dream was always the same. I walked through the empty streets of Lovecraft, empty except for the creatures that skulked in the shadows of my real city, my home. Nightjars walked in broad daylight. Springheel jacks shed their human skin and let their long-jawed animal snouts scent the air. The deep-sea aquanoids that swam in the waters off Innsmouth and Nantucket stared at me with glassy, gibbous eyes.
In this Lovecraft, I was alone. In this Lovecraft, only the necrovirus shadowed my footsteps.
I’d had the dream a dozen times, a hundred times. It wasn’t even a dream, because dreams come from a person’s brain and I knew deep down that this one came directly from my madness.
It had no meaning, except that I was indeed doomed to Nerissa and Conrad’s fate. Nerissa saw things. Conrad heard voices. Neither of them had a strange magic in their blood. Just a virus. I wanted to believe my father, but what if he was just as insane?
I dreamed. And I would lie to everyone about the dream, until the day came that I couldn’t lie anymore.
As I dreamed I walked, through Uptown and down Derleth Street to the river, watching the red water bubble and hiss, the ghouls came out of their holes to urge me onward, hunched and hissing like a nightmare honor guard.
Every time I reached the riverbank in the dream—and I always reached it—I tried to throw myself in, to swim and escape or drown and forget. I was never certain which. But every time, the ghouls closed in on me before I could do it, their clammy paws holding me back and their rubbery tongues making my bare skin slick.
Only this time, when I reached the riverwalk where Dunwich Lane and the arcade separated, a figure waited for me.
I’d have recognized the tall stooped body, the raven hair straight as my own was messy, the nervous tapping of finger on leg anywhere. My throat constricted, and the ghouls around me hissed and snarled to fill the silence. They ranged in size from child to full-grown wolf, some hunched on four legs and others walking upright like men. Any of them could have torn me asunder, but they stayed far clear of the figure at the river.
I found a whisper, little more than an aquanoid’s croak from cold and terror. “Conrad?”
My brother didn’t face me, just tilted his head so that the silver sun, eternally blinded by cloud cataracts in this dark dreaming world, caught his profile.
“It’s really me, Aoife.”
I stopped a few feet from him. At my heels, the ghouls closed in, but I ignored them. They weren’t as important as this new turn the dream had taken. They could eat me in their good time, as long as I spoke to Conrad.
“Conrad, I found it. I found the witch’s alphabet like you asked me. Tell me how to—”
“Wake up, Aoife.” His voice was flat and far away, like it was coming from an aethervox rather than his throat.
“Conrad, you have to tell me what to do,” I begged. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to find you.”
“Wake up, Aoife,” Conrad repeated. “It’s not real. Wake up.”
“I know it’s the necrovirus—” I started.
“It’s not real, Aoife,” Conrad snarled. “I was wrong. Stop trying to find me.”
I drew back, feeling as if he’d slapped me. Even if this was a dream, just my brain dancing with the pathogen in my blood, it was a horrid thing for my memory to serve up.
“I left the city,” I said. “For you. Conrad, just tell me—”
“Listen.” His outline shimmered, and in the refraction of light on water Conrad was only a black shadow, a shimmering insubstantial dream figure just like everything else about this gray, dream-place Lovecraft. “I put you in terrible danger, Aoife, and I didn’t know it. I haven’t any time and