bridge bobbed up several inches, relieved of the weight of the bike. As it did, he suddenly discovered that the stream below it was filled not with black water, but with animals.
They seethed.
“Shit,” Ronan said.
Jump, skip, throw a pebble, next turn.
See you on the other side.
He woke up.
8
It was morning.
Ronan could hear all sorts of morning sounds. An electric shaver humming across the hall, music nattering away in another room, feet slap-shuffling up and down aged stairs. Outside he heard asthmatic leaf blowers, percussive car doors, garrulous students, grumbling delivery trucks, petulant horns.
He’d spent the night in Cambridge.
Ronan looked at himself from above.
It was as if he were an angel haunting his own body. A spirit. Ghost of Christmas Past. Whatever it was that floated above you and watched you sleep. Ronan Lynch’s thoughts gazed down upon Ronan Lynch’s body.
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