Now
NEWS OF DOC’S death spread like wildfire across Harrod’s Reach.
Phone calls, texts, word-of-mouth.
They knocked on doors, spoke to neighbors over fences.
By late afternoon, everyone in town had heard of his passing, and the mourning came heavy and hard. Maxine, now that Brody was down for a nap, cried in her bedroom with the door closed. Doc had delivered both of her babies. He’d been by their side during every moment of their post-accident hardships with Sully. Archie’s first reaction was to pour himself a shot of bourbon, and Gideon had joined him. Tammy Shimp, he could tell, felt awkward with the sudden quiet now permeating the town. She hadn’t known the doctor, but with how instantly the memory of him had infected every room inside the Smite House, she volunteered to return to the parlor while the rest of them dealt with the loss. Maddy, by then, had fully awakened on the couch, energized, from whatever nightmare had taken her an hour ago.
Archie, pale-faced as he tried not to cry, had eyed the bottle of Old Sam bourbon on the kitchen’s island as if he was not only tempted to take another but needed it to cope. But after he and Gideon shared a look of disdain, Archie left the bottle and stepped out of the kitchen. A minute later, Gideon looked out into the hallway, where Archie stood outside a closed bedroom door, listening to his wife cry on the other side of it but not, apparently, confident enough to knock or just walk in to comfort her. Gideon withdrew to the kitchen. A few minutes later it was evident by the hammering from an upstairs bedroom that his father had chosen to bury himself in his latest renovation.
Maddy looked up toward the ceiling, to the hammering up there, and must have come to the same conclusion. She looked sad. She was a quick study, and Gideon wanted badly to know as much about her as she was rapidly learning about the Duprees. He was surprised that Brody, down the hall, hadn’t awakened once Archie had started hammering. He looked at Maddy. She was no longer staring at the ceiling but right at him, biting her lip in a way that briefly distracted him from his grief.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah.” He scratched his head, wondered why he wasn’t crying. What he’d seen and done overseas had hardened him. Or maybe it was more of a numbing, but the truth was he’d learned nothing but how to bury things deeper until he didn’t feel much at all. “Me too.”
Maddy checked her phone, returned her gaze to him. “What now?”
They couldn’t wait here, staying idle, until Lauren Betts and her parents arrived from Missouri. Gideon said to Maddy, “Can I ask you some questions?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Before you passed out earlier, you said, Mr. Lullaby … And something about over there? And all those things you were saying when I ran in … What were you trying to say?”
“I don’t even know where to start. Or how.”
“At the beginning?”
“How much time you got?” She pulled her cell phone from her jeans and started thumb-tapping, scrolling. Just when he thought she was blowing him off, she handed him her phone and said, “That was me.”
Gideon looked at the screen, glanced, because he didn’t want to read any more than what he’d seen from the headline. Survivor of the Charleston Strangler Awakens from Three Week Coma. And in smaller print right below it: Charleston Native Madeline Boyle Expected to Make a Full Recovery. He couldn’t emotionally deal right now with any details of her attack, so he handed the phone back. “I’m sorry …”
“But that was me then, and here I am now,” she said. “I’ll do my best to explain the in between.” She paused as more hammer blows sounded above them. “Where I was … when I was out. When I was in my coma, I was … my mind was somewhere else. It’s hard to explain, just like it’s hard to fully remember any dream or nightmare once we’re out of it, but it was real. Even though it was in my mind, it was somewhere tangible. Vivid, like all nightmares and dreams when we’re having them. You’ve dreamt, right? You’ve had nightmares?”
“It’s rare that I don’t,” he said. Shoot anything that fucking moves, soldiers. Him opening fire. The little boy and his mother screaming. “I don’t sleep much anymore.”
“We all dream,” Maddy said. “But where my mind was during those days in a coma, that’s where, I think … that’s where we all go at night when we dream, Gideon. When we have nightmares. But we always wake up. What we remember is fleeting. It disappears from the mind. Our imagination. But us coma patients, we stay. We’re in it, and we’re there for a reason.”
“My brother is there right now? He and Amy … they’re married? In his mind?”
“Not only in his mind, but his mind is there. And she’s there too.”
“Maddy? Maddy, look at me, please.”
Her eyes were wet. “Yeah?”
“Are you saying you know my brother?”
“Yeah.” She laughed, wiped a tear from her left eye. “We’ve met.”
“I mean, before you arrived here today, did you know my brother?”
She stepped closer to him. “Yes. And can we assume now that everything I’m telling you is true? No bullshit?”
“Yes.”
“Like I told you earlier. He’s a man, Gideon. Over there, he’s a man.”
“In Lalaland?”
“Yes, Lalaland, and damn it, this is no joke.”
“I believe you, Maddy, every word.”
“Then stop questioning me,” she said. “We age quickly there. They call us Seers.”
“Seers?” My brother is a Seer? “And the Elders? Who are the Elders?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Only that they need more of them. In Lalaland.”
Gideon exhaled a deep breath, let it all sink in. “What does he look like? My brother?”
She laughed. “Ever seen the show Justified?”
“Yes.”
“Raylan Givens,” she said.
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Gideon nodded toward the parlor. “And the girl in there?”
Maddy looked up, but not at him. “She’s beautiful. Somehow in Lala, we’re all beautiful.” She finally looked at him. “Say something.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“That you think I’m insane?”
“But I don’t.”
“Good.” She uncapped the bourbon bottle, poured them both another shot. She tilted hers back first and he followed. It didn’t burn as badly as the first shot, but the alcohol was starting to relax him. “And Mr. Lullaby?”
“Something everyone feared,” she said. “He is the boogeyman. The monster under our bed. In our closets. He’s all of it, Gideon. He is the night.” She folded her arms, stared out the window at the encroaching dusk. “Funny how things come back, right? Our memory.”
“You mentioned a couple of other names before you blacked out. Mr. Dreams? The Nightmare Man?”
She blinked. Her eyelashes were long and beautiful. “Every country in the world has their monsters,” she said. “Every country has their lullabies, their legends and folklores. They all started the night of the First Sleep. Around a campfire one night, your brother told me this. The First Sleep. The Second Sleep. The Third Sleep … That’s how they keep track of time. By the number of sleeps. Here, they say I was out for like eight days, but in Lala, I was on my seventy-fifth sleep. I’d … you’re gonna think me nuts.”
“Come on, at this point, Maddy, I’d believed anything.”
“I’d started smoking,” she said quickly. “Okay? I tried cigarettes once as a teenager, but about threw up. For whatever reason, over there, they prolong life. Yeah, like I said, the Land of Wrong. And there are fruit trees over there that’ll kill you. But the First Sleep, maybe it’s when the first people on earth closed their eyes for the night, who really knows? But that’s what it is, that’s when Mr. Lullaby was created. Or created himself. And as the sleeps went on, his imagination created others. Beasts. Demons. Creatures that terrify us all while we sleep. Two of his creations he called Mr. Dreams and the Nightmare Man. A set of entities that offset each other. One plants nightmares in the hollows of children and the other takes them away.”
“The hollows?”
“Evidently all kids have them,” she said. “And according to that legend, that’s where the Nightmare Man plants them. In the hollows of children. That’s where the seeds grow into nightmares. The mythical twin, Mr. Dreams, takes them away.” She poured them both another shot of bourbon. She held it up and they clinked glasses. They downed them, winced in unison, and she went on. “At some point in the late eighteen hundreds, in Austria, these two mythical beings somehow made it through.” She held up her hand to stop his question. “Their … spirits, or whatever, they found a way here. On this side. And they’re still out there.”
“How?”
“Inside real people, Gideon.”
“What, like possession?”
“Something like it.”
“And Mr. Lullaby?”
“Has been trying to do the same ever since,” she said. “Or maybe worse.”
“What could be worse?”
“I don’t know,” she said with aggression, and then softer. “I don’t know. But I was sent back as a warning. They’re fighting among themselves over there. They’re disagreeing on how best to keep us protected. How best to guard those doors. That’s why I was sent to unify them here.” She touched her head at her temples, like she was battling a sudden pain or now, as they spoke, having more memories come to her. “That’s what they do over there, Gideon. They might seem like vegetables over here, but in Lala, they’re warriors, they’re soldiers, and they live every waking minute trying to keep us safe.”
“What, like Watchers on the Wall??”
She turned away from him. “Just stop. I shouldn’t have come, this is crazy.” He moved quickly around the island to her. She said, “Don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, pleading, like his old self. “But you have to admit that—”
“I know, it sounds fucked.” She teared up again. “I admit that, but …”
He stopped a few feet away from her. “Come here.” He opened his arms to her. They’d only met a few hours ago, and maybe it was asinine to think she would come to him for any form of comfort, but alcohol was coursing through him and probably her and whether she needed to be held or not, he did. His body hadn’t stopped thrumming since he’d gotten the news that Doc had died. Doc Bigsby was like family. To many in town, he was Harrod’s Reach, and even though Gideon hadn’t seen him in three years, it did little to dampen the emotional blow turning his legs to jelly and his heart to concrete. When most in town had blamed Gideon for what happened to Sully, to the good son, Doc had taken up for him, even, to an extent, defending him to his own father, Archie, who, to this day, to this very fucking minute, upstairs hammering, still blamed him. So yeah, he needed a hug and Maddy Boyle gave it to him, slipping inside his arms right there in the kitchen of the Smite House, wrapping her arms around his waist and burying her face into his chest like she’d not only needed it herself but had somehow been there before.
In his arms. His embrace. She smelled his shirt. He rested his chin on her head and smelled her hair. He rubbed her back and felt her spine and shoulder blades, her heart beating, and he never wanted to let go. This was how he’d always imagined he’d one day hold Beth, but he knew that was never to be.
Maddy said, “What are you thinking right now?”
“That I want to know everything about you,” he said. “Tell me something.”
“Like what?” she asked, her ear against his chest.
“Something you think would turn me away.”
She laughed, went silent. A few seconds later, she said, “I’m a stripper. Was … a stripper.”
“Okay,” he said. It wasn’t what he expected to hear, and it didn’t matter anyway. She could have told him she was an alien, and it wouldn’t have mattered.
“And you?” she asked.
“I’m a coward.”
She squeezed him tighter, said, “I don’t think so.”
Then you’re the only one, he thought.
She pulled away just enough to look up at him. He’d always been self-conscious about the scar above his upper lip and knew that’s what she was staring at. Every part of him wanted to kiss her. To see if she’d be put off by it, like he always feared Beth was.
Maddy’s voice stole him from his reverie. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For believing me,” she said. “That was my worst fear coming here. That no one would believe me. But trust me when I say that our imaginations have no bounds. Some have bigger imaginations than others. But our thoughts all come from somewhere, right? Our imaginations? What if we’re pulling them all from somewhere that’s real,” she said. “Because it is. And they’re doing their best over there to keep it contained. But trust me, it isn’t Mr. Lullaby they’re scared of, because they don’t fear for their own lives in Lala. They’re fearless …”
Gideon closed his eyes.
She said, “What?”
“That’s what everyone always said about Sully. That he was the most fearless boy they’d ever seen.” And Beth, he thought. And Beth …
Maddy continued: “They’re scared for us, Gideon, on this side. They’re scared of what might happened if Mr. Lullaby gets through.”
Gideon recalled what he’d seen at the tunnel this morning and knew that portions of Lalaland already had. He stared into her eyes.
“Your brother hugged me before he sent me back.” She bit her lip again. “But you’re better at it.”
He was about to kiss her when Brody started crying down the hall.
She patted his chest. “I’ll get him.” She slithered away.
He watched her go. He should have been shocked by how easily she’d merged into the house and family here, like she belonged. Her footsteps trailed down the hallway. A few seconds later Brody stopped crying. Gideon’s cell phone chimed with a text from Beth. Meet me at Doc’s house. I’m on the way there now.
He responded: B there soon.
Maddy entered the kitchen with Brody in her arms. The boy looked foggy-eyed from having just woken up to Archie’s hammering, but otherwise content.
The boy pointed, said, “Gideon.”
Gideon smiled, and it was genuine, as he’d half-expected Jax to have taught him the name Giddy-Up.
Maddy walked Brody over. “Here, he wants you.”
“What? No, he doesn’t.”
She handed him over anyway and Gideon had no choice but to grab him, awkwardly. She laughed, helped him reposition Brody. “Haven’t you ever held a kid before?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess.”
Not since Sully was little.
Gideon looked at the boy, found Brody’s face inches from his and curiously staring. His little finger touched the scar on Gideon’s lip.
Gideon at first flinched away, before allowing the boy’s finger to explore.
Maddy said, “He’s got your nose.”
Gideon said, “What? He’s not mine, he’s …”
“I know,” she said. “But even so, he’s got it.”