The Radiant Road (18 page)

The tall figure shrank and bent. Now it was a shambling mongrel with one cataract-covered eye. Growling, the dog opened its jaws.

A little red bird fell to the ground, shook its wings, and flew away.

As relief flooded Clare, and the siren whined her name—
Clare! Clare!
—hands seized her arms, and she woke up.

It was Finn holding her arms, and the smoking ruins beneath her were dissolving back into cool sand, and the ocean's rush covered the fading siren.

They were kneeling on the sand, and Finn was out of breath with running. “Say, Clare, how you are! Are you all right?”

“How would I know?” said still-half-dreaming Clare. “How would I know if I'm all right or not? Let me go.”

Her legs and hands were filthy with soot and ash, and she had a painful burn on her wrist. “Well, I'm okay,” said Clare, as she brushed the dirt from her jeans. “It ended up all right.”

“Glad for that,” said Finn, gruff. “But you should have waited. Take this drink, now, to stay awake, at least for a while. Keep you safe, in this next bit.”

He sat on the sand beside her, his legs stretched out, eyes closed.

Clare drank the bitter drink, which tasted like strong, unsugared tea. She felt tired, shaken, and ashamed, and her wrist hurt a lot, but
she wasn't going to say that to Finn. “I need to wait a minute, okay? Just give me a minute, before we try again. That was . . . that was a lot.”

He nodded. She looked up, searching for a first star, something to wish on, or just to see. But stars never come where no night comes.

“I don't even know why we dream,” she said. “It's such a weird thing to do. Do you know?”

“Ah, well,” said Finn. The light around him was so clear, each dark hair outlined against the silvery sky, and Clare's heart ached toward him, just a little. “I believe you come to converse with your true selves. I believe it's the only place you can. You converse with yourself. You choose who you are.”

“‘True self,' though,” Clare said, doubtful. “What is my
true
self
, exactly, if it's not me, if I can talk with it.”

Finn frowned into the silver-gray sea. “I did not say ‘talk,'” he said. After a silence, he added, “Your true self is the part of you that loves. The part that sees and makes beauty.”

“All my dreams aren't beautiful. At
all
,” said Clare, thinking of the blasted city.

“You mean all your dreams are not pretty or nice or sweet. But beauty is in what's true.”

Clare thought about her dreams of clogged bathrooms, of tests she didn't study for, and still felt doubt. “I don't know,” said Clare. “I still don't know about ‘true self.'”

“Ah, you care so much what things are called,” said Finn, with sudden emotion. “Choose what you want to call it, the part that sees, the part that loves.”

“I guess I would call it my mind,” said Clare.

“Your mind! Oh, well then,” said Finn. He was silent for a moment, hunched in like a coiled rope, the sea-sound a steady wash behind him. “Then what do you call the part of you that's ever planning a meal or a revenge, or nursing a grudge or a fantasy?” He turned to her now, frank and incredulous. “What do you call the part that frightens you away from making, except when it's sound asleep and you can slip away to Timeless? The part that chatters away in your ear, when with just one moment of silence, the whole ceaseless beauty of your changing world would open itself to you?”

“I call that my mind, too,” said Clare stiffly.

“Well, then,” said sardonic Finn, “‘mind' is not the most useful word you have.”

They were quiet awhile, in the unchanging light, whose unchangingness was beginning to make Clare feel a little ill. “So but then, if the roads were closed, and we couldn't dream, how would the human world change?”

Finn stared at something in the sand. He said, “Your world wouldn't change. But you would no longer have eyes to see it. Even your scientists know that when people cannot dream, they go mad.
All of you would go mad. The world would look like dust to you, and you would love no one, not mother or father, not husband or friend.”

Clare tried to imagine a world without dreams and without the Strange fairy-makings, the flowerings of Timeless. She tried to imagine all the people walking around in it, unable to love.

Clare stood, brushed herself off. The leg she had been sitting on was stiff and painful. “I'm going to try now,” she said. She felt stubborn. Sometimes she thought her stubbornness—which her father would tease her about,
bullheaded child
, and which had so enraged Balor—was the only thing that kept her going.

“Aye, then,” said Finn, not looking at her. “I'll be here.”

“Will you be
watching
?”

He looked up with a tired expression. “I can't leave, how can I? I'm your teacher. I don't understand why you fear for anyone to see your dreams and makings.”

“Because dreams and makings are my private self, not for just anyone to see.”

“It's mad, to me,” he said, “but you are mad Clare. But—another but—I am Finn the Sane, and I am not just anyone to see.”

Clare smiled to herself. He was not just anyone, though perhaps that made the seeing worse. The ocean rushed and rushed behind their comfortable silence.

Suddenly, Clare realized what was strange about that sound.
“Finn,” she said. “This is weird. Does the ocean sound never change? Does it always go back and forth in the same pattern, like that, and never change its speed, or get louder or softer, or—”

He stood up abruptly. “Just dream then,” he said coldly. “And be careful with it this time, and stay awake inside it. The danger you make won't be only to you. If you fall asleep or lose control, the murderer's knife could just as well go into me.”

Bewildered and embarrassed, Clare said, matching his coldness: “Don't worry, I'm awake.” She thought,
I've hurt his feelings
, but could not imagine how.

Everything I do goes wrong.

“I think I need to be farther away from the fire to begin this,” she said, not adding, but thinking,
and farther away from you.

“Well enough,” said Finn.

Clare pointed toward the dunes. “I'm going to climb up there,” she said. “Maybe you'll be
safer
.”

“Good,” said Finn shortly. But when he turned toward her, his face was unexpectedly warm and worried. “Only remember, Clare. In a dream, what you want will come out, one way or the other. ”

“So . . . So I should be careful about what I want, then, right?”

“No, you can't be careful with what you want. Wanting isn't a pet who stays at your heels; it's a wild animal. You must become friendly
with it. It will make an offer, and you will respond. Converse with what you want that way.”

“So what should I try to want? What should I look for?”

“Never look for what you
should
want and desire, but what you
do
want and desire. You should know that from your poetry. It is the only way to make true. What you desire will appear, no matter how you try to erase or recolor it.”

“All right,” said Clare. She turned her back on the ocean and the fire, and began to walk toward the dunes.

Clare nodded. She walked a few hundred yards from the fire, took the dunes in a few dozen long, sinking steps, and sat at the top, looking down at the fire. Then she stretched her throat, looking up at the pale, transparent blue sky. She missed stars.

Clare thought of the story from
The Little Prince
, where the fox taught the prince how they could tame each other, by sitting together every day, each day a little closer.
I'll tame my wants
, she thought.
Or I guess we'll tame each other.

The fire flickered on the beach, pulsing colors of sun and orange.
What is it?
she asked herself.
What is that flame? It's what I want
, she thought.
Or no, not what
I
want. It's just: wanting.

And what did Clare want? What did she want to see there? She followed the thread of her desire to find out.

The flame became a tall statue of a grieving face.

The flame became a curtain of dark, tangled hair, the face obscured.

The hair became red hair, and the head turning toward her, and the face she almost saw—but
n
o
, she thought,
I can never tame that.
“No, no, I'm sorry, I can't,” she said, soft but aloud. And the red hair shifted, became red flame again. The flame became a tall black man, old and thin but strong, tough, with a hard face.

The man grew immensely tall, and his legs became a gate. Clare thought,
Yes. I want to see what is inside the gate.
And as she felt that, beyond the gate a stairway appeared. Clare walked down the dune, entered the gate, and descended the stair.

Clare dreamed she was in a tunnel. She dreamed it awake, although she could not remember making the tunnel, and feared it, a little.

She feared the tunnel because it was alive. It throbbed delicately around her.

But I don't have to feel afraid. It's my dream.
A little surge of wicked freedom, in that feeling.

She touched a hand to the wall of the tunnel. The wall was wood, but living wood, not carved and dry. Immediately, with a flood of pleasure, she knew where she was: inside the root of a tree, the same tree she had become on the island.

In that case, if she ran all the way to the end of the root, she would find her yew again.

Now her feet flew down the wooden path, her fingers brushing the sides of the root, sometimes brushing empty darkness where the root branched off in new directions. She did not remember the way, but her body and blood recalled her hours as a tree, and they flew on. In this crazy maze of passages, her body knew each twist and turn as if she had ridden them on her bike to school every morning. Heart wide-open, almost laughing, she ran on, until she reached the branching she knew, that her feet and blood and heart knew, would take her to the yew.

But the darkness of this last passage felt very dark. She stopped.

Something was in there: something large, taking long, harsh breaths, grunting and snuffling to itself, as it waited for her.

A flush of fear. Then Clare remembered:
I decide.
“No monster,” she said. “There is no monster there, the path is clear and easy, I can run through and be free.”

But the low, hoarse breath continued, slow and deep.

It's my dream
, thought stubborn Clare. She knotted up her fists and walked toward the grunting, monstrous sound. For a while she walked, blind in the blackness, her skin twitching at the most delicate caress of air. The wet, rasping breath seemed to come from all around her.

My dream
, Clare thought.
And
I want light.
But she wasn't sure she wanted to see what breathed like that. So she called up just a glimmer, just enough to see, far down the root-passage.

“Be my yew,” she whispered to the light, putting into those three words all her longing, and sending them out like a message in a bottle to this dream-world. And yes, yes: now someone was walking toward her out of the darkness, as the breathing still echoed around her, someone no taller than she, someone whose fists were clenched, whose hair was red, whose face was pale and strained.

Clare came face-to-face with the mirror and stopped.

But the figure in the mirror kept walking toward her, closer and closer, until only a single eye filled the glass. Clare put her hand to the reflected eye, as gently as she could, in case it hurt. And at that touch, she was flooded once more with a thrill of joy and release and relief, the joy she'd felt when her roots touched the roots of the yew.