Page 27 of A Theory of Dreaming
Sleep could not find him. Or perhaps he would not let it. Effy went to the bathroom to take her pills, returning in her lace-edged silk nightdress and a gauzy, cream-colored robe that made something clench in the bottom of his belly. Then Preston watched in astonishment as she pulled the covers up, nestled her head against the pillows, closed her eyes, and slept.
Her hair fell in golden waves over her shoulder, streaming out against the sheets, loose strands feathering about her face. She breathed evenly but heavily, as if every inhale was something of a labor. And, between each breath, Preston’s stomach knotted with worry, with the fear that it might be her last. It was an utterlyirrational fear, of course. Sleep was not death—it wasdeath’s distant cousin, as Ardor himself had written. But he could not manage to reason himself out of it.
Preston resisted the urge to run his finger across her flushed cheek, or brush back a strand of hair—anything to disrupt her eerie, ethereal stillness. That instinct, however, he was able to reason himself out of. He slumped back in her desk chair and stared at her, and listened to the nervous pattering of his own heart.
I love you, he thought as he looked at her sleeping form.I love you.For some reason it had become so difficult to speak aloud. Perhaps because his next thought, always, wasI might lose you.
His mind was starting to escape him. Surely that was the only explanation. A little bit of madness, carried back from Hiraeth, like poison in his blood. It was splicing his sleep with nightmares. It was making him feel unmoored from himself, moved more easily to anger, to fear.
Yet there were some things for which he could conjure no explanation. The water in his watch. The fact that Master Gosse had been there; he had seen what Preston had seen. Was it possible for two people to experience the same hallucination? The words of the strange man in the palace returned to him.
Young unbeliever, your mind as sharp as steel; it is for you and only you that the great bells peal.
These were not the thoughts of a sane person, surely. Preston’s gaze drew away from Effy, to the bottles of pills on her bedside table. If he put one of the pink tablets on his tongue and swallowed it, would that eradicate these thoughts? Obliterate his imagination?And the white tablets, the sleeping pills—would they allow him one peaceful, oblivious slumber?
After they had returned—after they had woken—Master Gosse had grasped Preston forcefully by the collar. His brow was beaded with sweat; his blue eyes were wild and wheeling.
“Did it work, Héloury?” he demanded in a rasp. “I saw nothing but black—I couldsensesomething, at a distance, but I could not reach it. I could not move. My mind could only turn on in my still body. Was it the same for you? What did you see?”
Preston had swallowed, acutely aware of how Gosse’s knuckles were brushing his throat. “I saw—”
And then, blessedly, Effy had rescued him with her knock on the door.
Remembering it, Preston let out a breath of relief. He could not put off Master Gosse indefinitely, but at least for now, the dream was his own. And it trulywashis own—at least, that was what the man in the palace had said.Son of Argant. Son of Llyr. This world has been built for you. Now you may mold it to your desires.
And so he had. His father had appeared to him, just as he had been before the accident, before they had tossed dirt upon his coffin and spoken blessings over his corpse in the old language of Argant. Before his mother had wept and Preston had put his arm around her and pressed her face against his chest to muffle her sobs, because he knew she would have hated the funeral guests to overhear. Before his brother, Oliver, had locked himself in his room for nearly two days and Preston had to break the lock from the outside, just to find Ollie curled on the floor, tracks of salt drying on his cheeks, his gaze glassy and empty.
Preston closed his eyes, willing these memories away. Instead, he filled his mind with the fresh thoughts of his father, the warmth of his embrace within the palace’s marble walls. The dream felt as real to him as any memory. Realer, perhaps.
Still he had more questions than answers. Still the bells rang from that unknown source. And so, sitting there, with the vestiges of the dream washing over him like the foam-lipped tide, Preston decided that he would try to uncover the truth. Just because these occurrences seemed unreasonable didn’t meanhehad to be. He did not have to give himself over entirely to fairy tales and magic.
But perhaps that would not be a bad place to begin. His father’s voice echoed, bleary and rippling, as if he were hearing it drift upward from below water.
“‘But all was not lost, when the city of Ys sank beneath the waves. Under the sea, mermaids pray in the cathedral. Under the sea, fire burns green.’”
Preston got to his feet with a start. He dug into his satchel for a handful of change, slipped his coat over his shoulders, and hurried outside, to the nearest phone booth.
The wind had gone quiet, but the still air had a sharpness to it, pricking him all over with needles of cold. It was not much warmer inside the telephone booth, and Preston’s stiff fingers shook as he slotted in the coins. Putting the receiver to his ear, he listened to the hum of static and then the grating ring. One. Two. Three.
“Hello?”
He felt so relieved to hear his mother’s voice that his knees nearly buckled. “Mother?”
“Preston?” She sounded both bleary and alarmed. It was late—he must have woken her. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”
He exhaled, a white cloud of breath. “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”
In a sense this was true; he hadn’t been physically harmed. Perhaps that was why he managed to make his voice convincing enough for his mother to give a relieved sigh in return. There was some shuffling as she adjusted the receiver.
“It’s so late, lovey,” she said. “What are you doing up?”
Preston swallowed so hard he was certain she would be able to hear it on her end of the line. The soft familiarity of her tone, the term of endearment—all of it made him feel quivery and painfully homesick.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he admitted. “For several days now, actually.”
“I read the article, in theLlyrian Times,” his mother said. He could almost see the way her eyebrows drew together with concern. “They haven’t been bothering you, have they? The reporters?”
“No, not really.” He was not going to tell his mother about Finisterre.
