TWISTING LANES

“We’ll find the end of a lane and climb over the fence,” Andrea yelled to Francis as they ran. She didn’t care if she got poked with the stars at the top. She could handle a little bit of pain, protect Francis with her own body if she had to, if that’s what it took to get out of this nightmare for good.

“Got it!” he shouted back, his sweet little voice determined.

Andrea slowed a little so Francis wouldn’t fall behind with his much shorter legs. He scanned the lanes, his eyes wide-open and alert. Andrea hoped the adrenaline would last long enough for them to find a way to get free.

They turned down the lane that contained Francis’s nightmare and so many others, running straight past it while half expecting to see the Sandman jump out from behind every shadow. They wove around groups of tired-eyed children, squealing and cackling, feverish from Reverie’s thrills. Children who had been there for decades, or even centuries, maybe. The fence poked out through the gaps in the tents at certain angles and beyond where the lanes curved. Andrea led Francis, cheeks flushed and arms pumping, toward one of the spaces, pushing herself between the walls of thick canvas.

“Come on,” Andrea said, turning and reaching a hand back to pull her brother through a particularly tight opening as the shadow of a top hat passed along the dream tent to their right. The fence stood just a few feet away. “We’re almost there.”

When she turned forward, the space between the tents had changed. Where only moments before it had been an access point to the fence, it now opened up to another long Reverie lane, the fence only visible through the gaps in another set of tents a long distance away.

Undeterred, Andrea and Francis ran down the sloping lane and pulled forward once more between the tents. This time Andrea reached out her hand to clasp the iron bars. She didn’t turn away as they drew near.

But in a single blink the fence was suddenly gone, replaced by another long stretch of tents, the fence once again a long distance beyond it.

“It isn’t possible for you to leave . . .” The Sandman’s words snaked past them in an unwelcome wind. Heat singed Andrea’s stomach, but this wouldn’t defeat her, no matter what twisted game the Sandman had decided to play. They wouldn’t stop. They were going to find a way to escape.

Andrea and Francis ran and ran and ran some more. The fence melted into stripes of blue and white before her eyes as she reached out to touch it, or the lanes bent backward around themselves so they couldn’t get near the edge. Silhouettes of umbrellas danced along the sides of the striped tents, teasing them. It was as if the Sandman was rearranging the dreams as they went, letting them know he kept up with their every move. Andrea glanced up at the Dream Clock in the center as they pursued the edge of a circus that had turned into a twisting, senseless maze. They ran until Andrea’s chest burned with every breath and her legs ran out of strength. They made their way to the other side of the Dream Clock entirely, without ever crossing past it and without ever reaching the end of a lane.

“I have to stop,” Francis huffed. His footsteps slowed behind her and he bent over, his chest heaving in and out.

Andrea put a hand on Francis’s back. “Breathe, buddy,” she said. “It’s okay, just breathe.” She kicked the dirt and looked around the lane, at all the children going merrily along their way as if everything was fine while the Sandman had tricked her and Francis into running out their strength, taking pleasure in their futile attempt to get free.

Still, Andrea had seen Reverie’s gate and the fence around it before she even came inside. It didn’t go on forever and ever. It was contained within a field in the woods behind her house.

Though it had seemed so much bigger than the field even the first time she saw it, and Margaret Grace had said it could be in more than one place at once so the kids who needed Reverie could find it.

There had to be a way out, even if it was back the way they’d come. Back to the one place she had ever touched Reverie’s edge.

“We’re going to have to go back to the gate, Francis,” Andrea said, still breathing heavily.

Francis’s face turned ashen. “But he’s watching us. What if he’s there? Or his dream sister? What if they’re guarding it?”

He had been watching them, but they had no other chance of escaping if they could never even reach the fence. Andrea set her jaw as she scanned a path to the fairway. “Right now we’re stuck if we stay in the middle. We have to at least try.”

“Okay . . . okay,” Francis said, bringing himself back to standing. “I can get to the gate. But it’s just so high . . . and spiky.”

Francis was right.

Maybe the way out of this place wasn’t over the fence at all.

Maybe it was under.

“Francis . . . I think we should make a quick stop on our way over. We need to find a shovel.”

A flash of understanding sparked in Francis’s eyes. The two siblings ran off with a single mission: enter the pirate dream and emerge with a shovel from the treasure hunt.

Once they had succeeded, they took off once more, this time straight past the Dream Clock and toward the crowded fairway, which buzzed, as ever, with moving children.

“Stay with me, Francis!” Andrea shouted behind her. She bumped shoulders with a kid in burlap pants rushing in the direction of the Dream Clock tower, shouting: “The show’s starting in the square! C’mon!”

A girl in crimson ballet shoes stood on pointe and juggled sparkling sticks above her black-and-white-painted face. A silver mime boy watched them, from his perch on top of a post, the only stillness in a sea of movement. Hordes of children gathered on the fairway, their faces blurring together as Andrea and Francis pushed upstream toward Reverie’s gate.

The crowd heading to the square built itself tighter and tighter around them, and Andrea’s muscles strained against the current, pushing against the frenzied, bumping bodies toward their goal. Above waves of bobbing heads, the gate stood as far away as ever even after they had spent themselves again with effort. Andrea couldn’t tell if this was another trick, if the Sandman had used his magic once more to interfere, or if it was all in her head and the exhaustion from being stuck here was once again messing up her ability to tell the difference between what was fake and what was real.

Andrea’s breath hitched as she caught a glimpse of herself in the shop filled with enchanted mirrors. Her own eyes now bore a slight purple hue beneath them. Not as deep as some of the other children, but enough to let Andrea know she had definitely stayed in Reverie longer than one night.

“Andrea!” Francis called to her, his voice pleading. Andrea turned only to see her little brother being sucked backward into the crowd headed for the show. His hand reached for her, but the pack of children closed in quickly around him, carrying him away.

“Francis!” This was not going to end with her losing her brother again. Not when they were this close to going home.

The pleasant delirium and the buzz of Reverie’s enchantment and the terror woven into all its nightmares whirled around Andrea, slow at first, then faster and faster like a carousel gone wild. Andrea saw the faces of her parents, frozen in their own home, her father’s eyes, wet and begging to be freed. The laughing boy outside the jester’s tent. Penny’s lonely face, staring after Andrea as she left her behind. Shimmering sand and lost dreams and sleep as black as death. Lost children and lost years and sweet candy tainted bitter. And a circus that hovered somewhere outside time but showed up at the exact moment a child was vulnerable enough to venture inside it. A hungry spider in a plum top hat, wrapping writhing victims inside its web.

And Francis.

The little boy she had comforted in his bed before he disappeared. His fear when she found him, tucked away, hidden in a dream. His sad, trusting eyes when she promised to bring him home. Her hope that he was real.

Andrea lunged into the sea of people.

“Francis!” She toppled children over, shoving them out of her way, then stumbling over a set of legs, falling forward, her body slamming into the hard dirt. From there, she caught sight of Francis’s striped pajamas behind a flurry of stomping feet, barely close enough to touch.

“Francis!” Andrea curled her fingers around the fabric and pulled his leg toward her. Her brother’s desperate, fear-filled face turned to hers in slow motion compared to the wild movement that had almost pulled them apart. Andrea knelt in the middle of the swarms of children and pulled her brother in tight, taking the brunt of the bumping bodies and stomping feet on her own bones.

All grew quiet as the chaos of Reverie faded like the calm in the middle of a storm. In that moment there was no Reverie. No Sandman, no lost children, no lost years. There was only Andrea and Francis. A sister who held her long-lost brother tightly inside her arms. His sweet-smelling hair and the body that folded easily into hers.

“Come on,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I’ve got you. Let’s go.”

A shovel in one hand and Francis’s hand in the other, Andrea led her brother past the edge of the crowd, to where the fairway opened up and Reverie’s gates stood, tall and black as night.

The place where this nightmare would end.