LOCKED GATES AND LIES

Andrea’s legs threatened to buckle beneath her. She reached out for something to hold on to, grabbing the corner of one of the nearby shops at the end of the fairway, painted in sea-glass green and offering things like scales from mermaids’ tails and tendrils from deep-sea witches. Salty air wafted from the shop’s open windows, enough for her to find her footing and her focus.

“But I’ve already left,” Andrea said, her voice biting. “I went home. I woke up on my floor and tried to stop my parents from giving away Francis’s things.”

“Did you truly go home?” the Sandman asked softly, as if reeling in a fish caught on a hook, letting her wriggle at every drawn-out word. “Did you wake up in your real room, Andrea? Did you ever leave Reverie through the gates?”

Andrea didn’t answer. Didn’t understand what he was getting at, what the Sandman was trying to say. She thought back to the morning when she had woken up on the floor. She had left Reverie.

But not through the gates.

She just . . . woke up, believing Reverie had all been a dream. She hadn’t given it any thought at the time, but when she came to back inside Reverie she’d woken up on the ground in the exact same spot where everything had melted around her.

Andrea grimaced as dread curled like smoke all around her and the chilling reality settled itself deep inside her bones: She had entered Reverie last night . . . and she had never left.

“I don’t understand,” Andrea pleaded, the heat behind her eyes building. “Why did it look like I woke up in my room?”

“That much is simple,” the Sandman explained, his voice cold and detached. “You broke a Reverie rule. You tried to remember the memory you gave up to earn your ticket without going through the tent. And when you do that, things . . . malfunction. The lines between dream and reality tend to blur. It can all be quite confusing. Which is why we warn you at the start not to do it. If you break the rules, the dreams have a way of sticking,” he said, his mouth bending down into a scowl. He lifted his shoe to find a tacky substance pulling slowly upward from the earth. “Like gum under your shoe.” He shook off the gum, sneaking a glance back at the Reverie crowds.

Andrea hadn’t pinched herself when she woke up that morning—hadn’t thought she needed to because she had woken up in her room. She understood now that if she had, she would have felt nothing, because it was all part of a terrible, awful dream.

Everything else Andrea had experienced since she arrived shifted then in her mind, taking on sharp edges and crystal-clear features. She hadn’t just stayed too long inside a nightmare. She was still living it. Reverie morphed itself into whatever appearance it wanted, a circus, her home, her room. It had no limits. And it was very, and horribly, real.

She had assumed that the starbursts on the top of the fence were meant to keep kids from getting in for free. But they were really meant to keep kids trapped inside the Sandman’s prison. A prison that lulled you into thinking it was only make-believe.

The heat behind her eyes grew, and with it, the threat of tears to put out the flame.

“Don’t cry, child.”

“I never cry!” Andrea flinched as the Sandman tried to pat her on the head, ducking out of the way.

The Sandman looked so different from the friendly images on the Dream Clock and the balloons, and the memorabilia lining the windows of so many shops. Andrea knew now that he didn’t only look different from the pictures of the old, gentle man plastered all over this place. She knew now that his heart was hard and dark and cold. And cruel.

The Sandman pulled his hands back, holding them up in surrender. “I never meant for you to fear me, dear one. I’m only trying to help you understand that this is for the best.”

The Sandman snapped his fingers, and Margaret Grace, the littlest girl from his dream, walked out from behind a corner and joined hands with her ringmaster brother, smiling at Andrea and Francis. He snapped them again, and the version of Margaret Grace from Reverie’s gates came out and stood next to the first. One final snap, and the Margaret Grace in the ball gown from the center of the Sandman’s private dream joined them, too.

“Margaret and I used to escape to Reverie often, didn’t we? This little world of my creation,” the Sandman said, looking dotingly down at the youngest version of his sister. “We’d run, zigging and zagging in and out of shops and tents, laughing and screaming and playing each night together before returning home.”

The youngest Margaret Grace grinned up at her brother. Then her face went vacant, wiped of expression. She turned around, facing her back to them all, head hung low.

“We grew, and still Reverie was our greatest comfort. Neither Margaret nor I had an easy time at home. We survived on our dreams. We inhaled them, breathed them in, ate them for dinner when there was no food in the cupboards.” The Margaret from the gates hung her head and turned around like the first.

“But my Margaret grew weary of dreaming.” He circled around the oldest version of his sister, who stared straight ahead, a quiet defiance on her face. “She offered to join me in Reverie one final time. She built the tent and sang the most beautiful song in front of an adoring crowd. And oh, how they cheered for her!” The Sandman paused, tipping his head and staring into his sister’s face. “After that night, I asked her to return to Reverie with me. To see if we could stay here forever, safe and happy and together. I begged her to see if we could stay. Why remain in a world that turned its back on us when we could have all this? But she insisted she was through.”

The Sandman turned back to Andrea and Francis. “A week later, my sister . . . my”—his voice cracked, and his eyes, dark as tunnels, brimmed with tears—“my precious sister contracted cholera and died.” The final Margaret Grace hung her head, too, and turned her back to them all.

Andrea fought against the Sandman’s story with everything she had inside her, but it set itself up like a mirror to her own suffering and pain. She closed her eyes a moment, determined to avoid seeing herself reflected in this horrible man and his desperate choices.

“She isn’t real,” Andrea insisted, turning her gaze to the strange set of dream sisters. “None of them are real.”

“Would you rather go back? Truly?” The Sandman lifted his chin. “To a world where there is no magic? Where people we love die, and parents split up, and brothers disappear?” He crept closer to them. “Your brother wanted to escape a shattered world. A world where his family was breaking and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And now he gets to stay.”

“This wasn’t what he meant,” Andrea said, gripping tight to her brother’s hand where he hid behind her. “He didn’t mean to never come home.”

“And you!” The Sandman leaned toward her, hovering over her head, blocking out the light of the round, fat moon with his hat.

“You so badly wanted to escape a world where you lost your brother, where people pitied the child who wasn’t meant to be alone. Where even your parents had given up hoping they’d find him. I’ve done nothing but grant your wish. It took some extra magic . . .” He peered over the top of Andrea’s head at a cowering Francis, as if that somehow proved his point. “But I brought you to a world where your brother could be found.”

Where her brother could be found.

The Sandman’s choice of words slammed into her heart like a tidal wave on a stormy sea. If he knew her heart’s biggest, truest wish was to find her little brother . . . was the boy with her now really Francis? The real, living, breathing brother she had lost?

Or—her heart surged in pain as if someone had shocked it—was he also somehow part of the nightmare she was trapped in, like the Sandman’s dream versions of Margaret Grace? A brother built for her out of the strongest of Reverie’s magic, a dream who was warm to the touch but who would burn away like the crawling mist at dawn.

Andrea pulled Francis around to her front and clutched him tightly, smelling his still-sweet hair and holding his shaking frame as he clung to her, trusting her to make this right.

She grasped at the thin thread of hope that maybe the Sandman didn’t mean what he had implied. Andrea had already lost Francis once, and it nearly broke her. She would dissolve into slivers of flesh and blood and shattered heart if she lost her brother a second time.

One thing was for certain: Andrea wasn’t going to pull Francis into the seed of doubt the Sandman had placed inside her head.

“It may not be the answer you hoped for, but it is for the best if you stay,” the Sandman continued. “After all, what kind of person would I be if I offered children safety, and joy, and escape, then sent them back out into a world that would only bring them pain and suffering in the end?” A single tear fell in a jagged line down the Sandman’s face. “Yes. Indeed. It is certainly better that you should have to stay.”

The Sandman offered his arm as if he meant to tuck them into the fold. “Now come, children,” he said as Andrea and Francis recoiled. “There are many, many wonders you have yet to see. There’s no point in dwelling on useless things when one is in a land of dreams.”

“I’ll keep them company!”

Andrea and Francis jumped.

Penny sprung out from the doorway of the empty shop. “I have no interest in going home, sir. And, gee, I know almost everything about this place.” She stuck her hands on her hips and passed a devious, knowing smile to the Sandman. The Sandman smiled back, as if pleased at last to find another who understood him.

It was disgusting. All of it. That Penny would want to be part of the Sandman’s twisted game, part of keeping children here against their will. But now at least it all made sense. Penny’s hesitation to bother the Sandman, and how important it was to her that he liked her. Andrea felt ridiculous now for ever having trusted her. Penny had been on the Sandman’s side the whole time.

Andrea stared hard at the smug expression on Penny’s face, trying to reconcile the girl standing before her now with the girl she had met on the fairway. She had seemed so sincere, maybe even overeager at times to have someone she could call a friend. And after Andrea survived Root River and started looking for Francis, Penny had insisted that all the children were only there for one night.

Andrea grasped at the possibility that maybe the Sandman was lying to Penny, too. That maybe, like the other Reverie children, Penny didn’t know the whole story.

The only reason Andrea knew how much time had passed was because she had lived three entire years in the real world without a brother. Without that, she would have had no reason to doubt that time simply “worked differently” in dreams. She would have run through the lanes like all the other Reverie children, thinking she had been granted one magically long night.

Maybe that was the reason the Sandman had tried so hard to keep her away from Francis. Francis was proof that Reverie children had been there a long, long time.

If he really was her brother.

Andrea shook the doubts off her shoulders, refusing to let them pull her down, sink her into despair. She would deal with what the Sandman said later. Right now she had a scared little boy beside her who might just be the one she had lost, and she wasn’t about to leave him behind.

And then there was Penny.

Andrea couldn’t be the only person in Reverie who had been fed the Sandman’s lies.

“Do you even know how long you’ve been here?” Andrea snapped at Penny.

“What does it matter?” the Sandman snapped back.

Penny gave a slight flinch, maybe, then continued to smirk, hip popped and chin held high, like she owned the place. If Andrea had caught Penny off guard, Penny sure hid it well.

“We have to get out of here,” Andrea whispered to Francis. “Listen carefully and do exactly as I say. We’re going to back up slowly. On the count of three, we run.”

Francis gave a slight nod, without taking his eyes off the Sandman.

“One,” they took a step backward.

“Children,” the Sandman said. “Where on earth are you going? There’s no need to run. You’re safe here. You’ll be safe forever.”

“Two.” They took another step.

“Oh,” the Sandman said, shaking his head. “This is quite unnecessary, I assure you.”

“Friends,” Penny pleaded with them. “Let me show you around. Please! I promise it’ll all be fine!”

“Three!” Andrea and Francis spun away from the Sandman and, hand in hand, ran as fast as they could down the fairway.