The Dream Thieves

Even Blue looked less fanciful than usual, the lighting rendering her lampshade dress and spiky hair as a melancholy Pierrot. “It feels the same as when you guys lived here,” Gansey said finally. “It seems like it should be different.”

“Did you come here a lot?” Blue asked.

He exchanged a glance with Ronan. “Often enough.” He didn’t say what Ronan was thinking, which was that Gansey was far more of a brother to Ronan than Declan had ever been.

Voice faded, Adam asked, “Could we get some water?” Ronan led them to the kitchen. It was a farmhouse kitchen, no frills, worn smooth by use. Nothing had ever been repaired or updated until it had stopped working, and so the room was an amalgam of decades and styles: plain white cabinets decorated with a combination of old glass knobs and brass handles, counters that were half new butcher-block and half dingy laminate, appliances a mixture of snowy white and polished stainless steel.

With Blue and Adam there, Ronan saw the Barns with fresh eyes. This was not the pretentious, beautiful old money of Gansey’s family. This house was shabby rich, betraying its wealth not with culture or airs but because no comfort was wanting: mismatched antiques and copper pots, real hand-painted art on the walls and real hand-knotted rugs on the floors. Where Gansey’s ancestral home was a no-touch museum of elegant, remote things, the Barns was a warren of pool tables and quilts, video game cords and shoddily expensive leather couches. Ronan loved it so much. He nearly couldn’t bear it. He wanted to destroy something.

Instead, he said, “Remember how I told you that Dad—that my father was like me?” He pointed to the toaster. It was an ordinary stainless-steel toaster, room for two slices of toast. Gansey raised an eyebrow. “That? Is a toaster.”

“Dream toaster.”

Adam laughed soundlessly.

“How can you tell?” asked Gansey.

Ronan slid the toaster out from the wall. There was no wall plug, no battery panel. Yet when he pressed down on the lever, the filaments inside began to glow. For how many years had he used this toaster before he’d realized that it was impossible? “What’s it run on, then?” Adam asked.

“Dream energy,” Ronan said. Chainsaw hopped untidily from Ronan’s shoulder to the counter and had to be smacked away from the appliance. “Cleanest there is.”

Adam’s dusty eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He replied, “Politicians wouldn’t be pleased. No offense to your mother, Gansey.”

“None taken,” Gansey said cordially.

“Oh, and that,” Ronan said, pointing at the calendar on the front of the fridge.

Blue paged through it. No one had been here to change over the month, but it didn’t matter. Every page was the same — twelve pages of April, every photo displaying three black birds sitting on a fence. There had been a time when Ronan had thought it was merely a gag gift. Now he could readily recognize the artifact of a frustration dream. Blue peered at the birds, her nose nearly touching the image. “Are these vultures or crows?” At the same time that Ronan said, “Crows,” Adam said, “Vultures.”

“What else is here?” Gansey asked. He was using his deeply curious voice and his deeply curious face, the ones he normally reserved for all things Glendower. “Dream things, I mean?” “Damned if I know,” Ronan replied. “Never made a study.” Gansey said, “Then let’s make a study.”

The four of them pushed out from the fridge, pulling open cabinets and shifting through items on the countertop. “Phone doesn’t plug into the wall,” Adam noted, turning an old-fashioned rotary dial phone upside down to look at it. “But there’s still a dial tone.”

In the age of cell phones, Ronan found this discovery profoundly disinteresting. He had just found a pencil that was really a pen; even though an exploratory scratch of a fingernail on the side of lead revealed that it was a leaded pencil, the tip released a perfect line of blue ink when dragged across the note pad beside the pencil can.

“Microwave’s not plugged in, either,” Adam said.

“Here’s a spoon with two ends,” Gansey added.

A high-pitched whine filled the kitchen; Blue had discovered that when the seat was rotated on one of the high stools, it emitted a wail that sounded a little like “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” played several times faster than it had ever been meant to be played. She gave it a few spins to see if it made it all the way through the tune. It didn’t. The product of another frustration dream.

“God damn it,” said Gansey, dropping a knife onto the counter. He shook his hand out. “It’s red hot.” Only it wasn’t. The blade was ordinary stainless steel, its heat only evident by the faint scent of the counter finish melting beneath it. He tapped the handle a few times to verify that it was the entire knife that was hot, not just the blade, and then used a dish towel to replace it in the knife block.

Ronan had stopped searching in earnest and was merely opening and slamming drawers for the pleasure of hearing them crash. He wasn’t sure what was worse: leaving or the anticipation of leaving.

“Well, this isn’t frustrating at all,” Adam remarked, demonstrating a tape measure he’d found. The tape tugged out to two feet, six inches, and no more. “I would’ve thrown this out the morning after.”

“Perfect for measuring bread boxes,” Gansey observed. “Maybe it has nostalgic value.”

“How about this?” Blue, out in the hall, touched the petal of a perfect blue lily. It was one of a dozen gathered into a bouquet on the hall table. Ronan had never given much thought to the flowers, but when he did, he’d always assumed they were fake, as the vase they were displayed in had never contained water. The white and blue lilies were oversized and spidery with frothy golden stamen, blossoms like nothing he’d seen elsewhere. He should’ve known, in retrospect. Adam pinched off a bud and turned the moist end of the stem to the other two boys. “They’re alive.”

This was the sort of thing that Gansey couldn’t resist, and so Adam and Ronan moved farther down the hall toward the dining room while Gansey lingered over the flowers. When Ronan glanced over his shoulder, Gansey stood with one of the blossoms cupped in his hand. There was something humble and awed in the way he stood, something grateful and wistful in his face as he gazed at the flower. It was a strangely deferential expression.

Somehow this made Ronan even angrier. He turned quickly away before Gansey could catch his eye. In the pale gray dining room, Adam was taking a wooden mask from a hook on the wall. It was carved of a smooth, dark wood and looked like a cheap tourist souvenir. The eye holes were round and surprised, the mouth parted in an easy smile big enough for lots of teeth. Ronan hurled himself through the air.