Page 55 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)
Effy lay inside the coffin, hands clasped over her chest. Her golden hair streamed out around her, tangling with the pale flowers that were scattered within: winter camellias.
She wore a gossamer nightdress, half-sheer, itself a relic of another time, or perhaps another world—one that was both impossible and eternal.
Her face was white and her eyes were closed, in a deep and imperturbable slumber.
Every dream is a living death.
Trembling, Preston knelt. He laid his palms flat on the glass. He could not tell if Effy breathed; he could not discern even the faintest rise and fall of her chest or the slight parting of her blanched lips.
Preston leaned over until his forehead was pressed against the glass. His throat began to tighten, the corners of his eyes began to sting, and, at last, he wept.
It was weak at first, restrained, and then all at once it was not. Sobs fell from his lips, tears wetting and blurring the glass. He wept at the astonishing beauty of her humanness. What a ruthless privilege it was, he thought, to love.
“I love you,” he whispered. The words came so easily now he couldn’t even fathom what had stopped them before. “I love you. Please come back.”
Tiny fissures began to appear in the glass, as thin as strands of spider silk.
Preston lifted his head a moment and watched in awe as the barrier between them shattered.
And when the glass broke apart, the shards did not fall; they merely vanished, leaving no remains of the coffin that held Effy’s sleeping form.
He waited, his breath squeezed agonizingly in his chest. Effy’s expression did not shift. Moments seemed to drag past, like some heavy flotsam caught in the drift. The green-fire torches smoked in their braziers. The sea remained at a slender distance, kept at bay by the marble walls.
“Please,” Preston said. “Don’t leave me here alone.”
Even the bells, he realized, had gone silent.
He leaned forward again, resting his head on Effy’s pillow, among the tangles and folds of her golden hair. More tears came, streaking his face with salt.
And then he felt it. The subtlest shift, like water moving under its mantle of ice. Preston looked up, and—
Effy took a breath and opened her eyes.
“Oh,” she whispered, before he could react, before he could even speak. “You’re here.”
“Yes.” He let out a shaky sound that was almost a laugh; he was so delirious with relief that it just bubbled out of him. “I’ll always be here.”
She reached up a hand, fingers quivering, and brushed them across his cheek. “You’re crying.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never seen you do that before.”
He let out another tremulous breath. He grasped Effy’s hand and held it there against his face. Tears trickled between their dovetailed fingers. “I know,” he said again. “It’s because I love you.”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “I don’t want to make you cry.”
“It’s all right. There’s always a chance that you’ll cry when you let yourself love someone.”
Effy nodded, and then tears sprang to the corners of her eyes, making their green color shine. “I want to go home,” she said. “Will you—will you take me home?”
“Yes.” He tasted the salt on his tongue. “Always.”
He bent over and lifted her—he would not have had the strength to do it in the real world, in the world above, but this realm had been built for him and, within it, whatever he wished would come true.
He slung Effy’s arms around his shoulders and braced his own around her back and below her knees.
The bridal carry, he had heard it called.
The long, diaphanous train of her white nightgown skimmed the marble floor.
Preston walked from the first chamber without looking back. He left behind the statue of the scholar and the mermaid and the maiden and the knight and the king. He left them behind in their eternal sleep.
The second chamber was not as it had been before.
The green torches on the wall burned low, more smoke than fire, casting the room in a filmy light.
The air was dense and humid, the scent of salt so thick that Preston struggled to breathe.
His clothes grew damp; there was a cold sheen on Effy’s skin.
Panic stirred in Preston’s chest as he looked around.
The marble walls were fissuring with cracks.
The window glass seemed to have grown thinner, rippling like wax paper.
Water was leaking in through narrow spaces, deepening the puddles on the floor, making everything hazy and dim and close .
The world pressed in on him from all sides.
Effy clutched weakly at his shirt, her lashes fluttering. He tightened his grip as he walked forward, to the base of her statue. Again, he knew what he would see when he reached it, but there was nothing that could assuage the agony he felt when he laid eyes on it, through the briny smog.
Her statue was cracked, right down its center. The crevasse went from the top of her head to her bare feet, and in it grew moss and algae and tiny white barnacles. Seaweed strands were draped over her limbs, dead starfish pasted to her cheek.
Horror rooted Preston to the ground, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Effy shifted against him, pressing her face to his shirt and giving a soft, plaintive mewling sound. Her fingers slackened slightly.
Whenever he had lingered here before, he had been so desperate to stay, so reluctant to return to the real world in all of its banal miseries. But now, as he walked, he kept squeezing his eyes shut, hoping that, at any moment, he would be thrust back. That he would wake.
You’re running out of time , some voice from within him said.
“Effy.” Preston jostled her slightly. “Stay awake, all right?”
“I’m trying,” she murmured.
He could hear them again now—the bells. Stumbling against the slick ground, Preston turned away from her broken statue and walked toward the archway to the final chamber. His heart thudded unevenly, out of rhythm with the music of the bells. Out of rhythm with his own labored breathing.
Preston stepped into the third chamber and found that he was not alone.
The king’s statue was in the distance, and the bells swung and tolled above, but before him, in the very center of the room, stood Master Gosse.
His adviser turned to him. His face had a ghostly pallor and was dewed with sweat, but when he saw Preston, he smiled.
“Héloury,” he said, “I didn’t expect you so soon.”
Preston looked up, through the glass ceiling and through the shuddering blue-green water. He saw the inner chamber of the Sleeper Museum, just as he had before, and Master Gosse’s body lying prone on the floor next to Aneurin the Bard’s shattered coffin.
“Well?” Master Gosse prompted. “Aren’t you going to ask how I managed to get here on my own?”
“No,” Preston said. “All this time you’ve been telling me it’s about belief. In fairy tales. In magic. But that’s not true. It’s about desire. If anyone wants it badly enough, they can make it here, too.”
“Perhaps so. But not everyone can mold this world so immaculately to their will. Were this my dream”—Master Gosse gestured about the chamber—“I would have decorated a bit differently.” At that, he laughed, a high, thin sound that made Preston’s skin prickle.
“It doesn’t matter.” Preston drew Effy closer to his chest. “You’re leaving. And so am I.”
Master Gosse cocked his head. “And why on earth would you want to do that?”
Overhead, the bells groaned, as if at last their ancient quality was showing. There was a layer of rust that Preston hadn’t noticed before. And the glass ceiling seemed to warp and strain, the water pressing in on it, fighting to be let in.
“Because this is a dream,” said Preston, “and you can’t live in dreams forever.”
“Surely by now you understand that this is no ordinary dream.” Master Gosse turned, and with a flourish he indicated the statue of the king.
His silver hand glinted in the rheumy beams of light.
“This place has a power that can touch the real world. We have barely tapped its potential. There is so much left for us to do—”
“ No ,” Preston bit out. “It’s not just touching the real world—it’s tainting it. It’s tainting both of us. You’re speaking madness.”
“Perhaps it is madness alone that allows the full truth to be seen.”
Preston just shook his head. The ceiling creaked, small cracks spidering through the glass. The sea rushed and rushed against it, foaming like surf break.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “There’s no truth here. Only the comfort of fantasy. The comfort of believing in stories.” With his chin, he indicated the statue of the king. “All of this has been built on a lie. There was no Aneurin the Bard.”
Master Gosse looked unperturbed. “Well, no, not in a literal sense. There was no singular man who penned the epic poem. He is a composite of many different authors; more likely than not, a school of poets. It was embellished over the centuries by other writers. But the character of Aneurin the Bard is real—as real as Angharad’s Fairy King.
As real, and as necessary. The people of Llyr need him. He is the soul of the nation.”
“If the soul of a nation requires an enemy, then it has no right to exist at all.” Preston’s stomach was churning now, all the anger he had bottled for so long rising in him.
“Neirin was king of all the island. We’re supposed to believe that the war between Llyr and Argant is some ancient blood feud.
That every Llyrian and Argantian should feel their enmity for the other deep in their bones.
But the truth is more mundane than that.
It’s about wealth and territory and all the other ordinary, worldly things that don’t fit neatly into a fairy tale.
The island was united once. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about its division. Just the lowly work of men.”