ROOT RIVER

Around Andrea the feet and legs of children scuffled, and above her towered the blue-and-white-striped Reverie tents. Her skin brushed not against the soft, manicured grass of her front yard but the packed dirt of Reverie’s lanes in the exact place the dream world had melted around her.

Andrea stood up, dusting the dirt off her jeans and grinning from ear to ear, pure elation washing away all the desperate sorrow.

She pinched herself, welcoming the sting.

Reverie was real. And she was back.

Andrea tucked the vial of sand back into her pocket. She needed to get inside another dream. Good dream, nightmare, she didn’t care. She needed to be swept away. This was why she had come here in the first place: to forget that Francis had disappeared, and how.

Andrea ran into the first tent she could find at the edge of the square that didn’t have a bunch of kids standing around it.

Here it was again, like it had been waiting for her, its pull just as strong as it had been the first time.

Root River.

Penny’s warning played like a loud recording in her mind, and Andrea recognized this lane as one of the ones Penny said was full of nightmares, but how bad could any dream or nightmare in this place really be? And it was clear the dream itself wanted her to enter.

Andrea pulled the canvas open and rushed inside it.

She entered into a park scene drenched in moonlight, with trim cut grass and a border of trees. A bubbling brook curved a path between her and a large playground on the other side. A willow tree stood by the river, its wispy leaves urging her forward, nearer to the water. She set her toes next to the river’s edge. Up close, a stronger current ran through it than she had been able to see from a few yards back. Clear water at the top dissolved into blackness so deep she couldn’t see the bottom. Still, something about the willow felt kind and gentle, like an old grandfather tree used to guiding children across the busy waters. She reached forward to brush the leaves with her fingers, trusting the old tree would wrap itself around her and lead her safely across the rumbling stream.

Andrea squinted, catching the curved lines of an ancient face etched into the tree bark. Deep grooves ran up and down over the tree’s wide, lumpy trunk, and a scar carved horizontally across it like a ragged scowl. Past the willow stood the playground, haloed by a single floodlight. The iron chains of a lone swing creaked forward and back, the only movement in a sea of still.

Damp, heavy air seeped around the place where Andrea stood. The scene sat strangely inside her, like a faint memory. Like she should know what would happen next. Like she had been here before. She reached down deep in her mind, probing it for more. Slowly, the pieces flooded back to her: a park, a river, a tree pretending to be kind. A fall. Legs turning to stone.

Andrea took a step back, her breaths growing ragged and shallow. She had heard of this place before—through her brother’s panicked, whispered words during the years he woke up from his recurring dream.

No. Not his dream. His nightmare.

The willow dragged me down into the water, he had said. It turned me into stone.

Andrea filled her lungs with as much air as she could in the moment before the willow plunged her underwater. Its branches wrapped around her arms and legs, digging deep and sending slivers beneath her skin. The roots of the willow curled around her ankles, dragging her to the bottom of the river.

She stretched her fingers, grasping for the surface, for anything to hold on to. Nothing. Freezing water slammed against her chest. She kicked wildly toward the surface, hoping she had enough time left to fight her way free.

The crisping started in her toes, stiffening them and moving quickly through her ankles. Her legs grew cold and numb and hard and smooth. Like stone.

Andrea opened her mouth to scream as metallic river water rushed deep into her lungs. She smacked her face, pinched at her arms. Flailed her working limbs, churning plumes of mud into the already murky water. She twisted, wild and unblinking, in every direction for the door that would let her back out into the safety of a Reverie lane. Penny had said there would always be a door.

Finally, when her lungs burned, and a blackness started edging into the corners of her vision, and her muscles had tired, and the moon’s pale glow wrapped softly around her, and her hair floated in lazy tentacles slowly toward the surface, Andrea saw it. Directly below her, a small slip of light reflected off a door handle on the river’s bottom. With her last ounce of strength Andrea pushed her arms down to it and pulled the door open, heavy under a layer of thick, slimy mud. She used her grip on the handle to yank herself and her lower half, now completely turned to stone, down through the exit. Her pulse quickened as her fingers touched dry air just past the boundary of the tent, and then as her arm and upper body followed.

One massive push later, and Andrea landed on the ground in front of the wretched tent, drenched, spitting out water and gasping for oxygen. The water soaked into the dirt around her, creating a muddy, blob-shaped shadow.

A group of kids, each under the influence of a dizzying sucker by the look of it, stumbled past her, almost running her over, before snickering and wandering away farther down the lane.

Andrea lay back, filling her lungs with the crisp night air.

She had been in Francis’s dream. Andrea tossed the idea around in her oxygen-starved head as long as it took to stick. She had been in Francis’s dream. And if she had been in his dream, that meant her brother had, at least at some point, been to Reverie. The Sandman, whoever he was, collected kids’ dreams as the price of admission. Francis must have paid with his nightmare to get his ticket, choosing to get it out of his head and into a Reverie tent.

Andrea wrung out her hair and stood tall, shaking off any lingering drips and not caring that her clothes were now cold and wet. She had to figure out when her brother had been here. If anyone had seen him.

And if, somehow, he was still here.