Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(10)
Bryde climbed down the hay bales, complaining as he did. “Aren’t you tired of doing this?”
Because this wasn’t the first time Ronan had trashed a place since they’d begun traveling with Bryde. He’d filled a thru-hiking shelter with bleeding rocks. Destroyed the living room of an abandoned rambler with a very small tornado. Busted out the wall of a cheap, cash-only motel with an invisible car. He’d trashed rooms with dead earthworms and hissing microphones, school textbooks and expired bacon. Every zip code they’d stayed in had been left with Ronan Lynch’s indelible mark.
Hennessy had to admit, a small, rubbishy part of her was glad for all of this. Because as long as Ronan Lynch, the great Ronan Lynch, was fucking up at this level, it made Hennessy’s inability to kick the Lace from her dreams not quite as damning.
“Hennessy, are you awake?” Bryde asked the air.
Hennessy couldn’t yet reply. Or move. Dreamers always did this after a successful dream; they saw their temporarily paralyzed bodies from above for a few minutes. She was still getting used to the idea that this paralysis didn’t have to be synonymous with shame. Before all this, it had always meant she’d made another copy of herself. It had meant failure. Now, even though she couldn’t see what she’d brought back from the dream, she was sure, at least, it wasn’t another Jordan Hennessy.
No more copies.
Ever.
She’d never been so long without any of her girls before.
Jordan, Jordan.
“The world shouts at you. The waking world, the dreaming world. You don’t have to listen to it, but you do. And until you learn to shout louder than it, we’re going to keep having this happen.” Bryde had uncovered Ronan from beneath a pile of hay bales and wheels like the prize in the bottom of a cereal box. His star pupil was just as paralyzed as Hennessy, so Ronan couldn’t escape the lecture as Bryde went on. “I expect better from you. How long did it take us to find a place with this much power in the bank? And what did you write a check for? This. This shit. Did you give half a thought to any other dreamer while you were doing this? No, you just ran your mouth and out this came.”
Aaaaaaaaand Hennessy was back. She could feel her body again, and she was looking at the world through her own eyes. Shouldering off her cage of wheels, she searched the hay around her, looking for whatever object she had brought back from her dream. The painting. The brush. The palette. Something. But all she found was hay and wheels and yet more hay.
Bryde was still going. “And what a way to die. Suffocated under rotting food for cows that don’t exist anymore. The Greywaren—isn’t that what your forest Lindenmere calls you? Dreamer and protector? Dreamer and protector and fool with lungs full of silage if I hadn’t been here. For what?”
“I was trying,” Ronan finally snarled.
“So was Hennessy, and you took it from her,” Bryde said. Man, that little rubbishy part of Hennessy was having a field day. “Did you manage to find your painting, Hennessy?”
“The haystack has not produced a needle thus far,” she said.
Bryde flicked his eyes around the barn. Dreams could sometimes end up quite far away from their dreamer, especially when they were big, but there was no sign of any of the large things from the dream, like a canvas, or the chair he’d been sitting on.
Then she spotted it.
On her thumb, there was the faintest smear of feather-pink paint, the same pink she’d smeared across the canvas in the dream. This was what she’d been paralyzed for, just a mere scraping of dried pigment. She supposed Jordan would’ve been delighted to see it. It wasn’t a dreamt copy of Hennessy. And it wasn’t the Lace. Technically, that was huge progress, even if it didn’t feel like it. Sometimes, as Ronan had just demonstrated, it was as much about what you didn’t dream as what you did.
She showed her thumb to Bryde as if she were hitchhiking. “Found it.”
Bryde rounded on Ronan again. “So you pulled the ley right out from beneath her. What a gentleman. How much is left now? What do you feel?”
Ronan looked like a cat doused with water.
“Right, you can’t, I forgot,” Bryde went on. “The fairy tales we tell ourselves are so comforting in times of darkness. I’ll tell you how much: very little. The ley line bent over backward for a barn full of wheels going nowhere. And if the Moderators drove up right now, where would you be? Up shit creek and unable to dream a paddle.”
The rubbishy part of Hennessy was still rubbishy and pleased to see Ronan getting reamed out, but the rest of her felt bad enough to come to his rescue.
“Pity, too,” she said, leaping to her feet. “I needed that ley line. I was just warming up. I was going to bring out Max Ernst’s entire cabin in Sedona. With Max Ernst inside it. And a bunch of his art. Maybe his wife, too. He built that thing with his own two hands after surviving two wars, did you know? The cabin, I mean, not the wife. I think she was from New York. Or maybe she moved there after Ernst died. I don’t remember, but I think she was the one who said there was no such thing as a woman artist, there was just an artist. Oh, I was also going to dream that bird thing of his, in your honor, Ronan Lynch. He was like you, had that bird alter ego, couldn’t tell the difference between birds and humans. Loplop.”
“Hennessy, this isn’t—” Bryde started.
She blew on. “I knew I’d have the name if I thought about it hard enough. Kept thinking it was rabbity, and it was. Lop. Lop. Yeah, so, the cabin, the studio, the Dadaist. It was going to be my dreaming masterwork, inspired by these dioramas. That’s the way a good artist works, isn’t it? She takes in the things around her and delivers not a copy but a response to the world she’s absorbed. I behold this supposed West Virginia Museum of Living History with its static figures frozen in staged historical moments and I raise you real people in actual historical properties, a surrealist in a surrealist piece. Now that’s living art. That’s what Dadaism is all about. This is the Hennessy museum, discounts available for children under twelve and parties over twenty!”