“It’s not your fault,” Jenny said. “And now the second thing.”
She reached down and rummaged in her bag, then took out the magazine and passed it to me.
The Writing Life.
I remembered how touched I’d been that she’d brought this for me. How it meant she’d been thinking of me. But then the text on the cover swam out of focus, and I realized the dream was slipping out of my control.
“They’re all the same,” Jenny said. “That’s why he won’t find it.”
My mother’s words. I rubbed the pages of the magazine between my finger and thumb, desperate to stay.
“What does that mean?”
But despite my efforts, everything around me was beginning to fade. The awareness of lying in bed in the hotel room was becoming more real than my presence on the bench, and I was going to wake up. But even though Jenny couldn’t possibly know the answer to my question, it seemed urgent to hear her reply.
“What’s the same?” I said. “What won’t he find?”
As I stared at what was left of her, a sudden flash of revelation went through me, and I thought I might understand. And even though the dream was all but gone now, and the room in the real world was solidifying around me, I saw her smile one last time before I woke completely, her face mouthing words I felt as much as heard.
Goodbye, Paul.
THIRTY-THREE
I felt spaced out as I drove to my mother’s house—so intent on getting there that I barely registered the journey.
That wasn’t entirely due to the inevitable drowsiness that came with lucid dreaming. Now that the idea had occurred to me, it felt important to get there quickly and see if it could possibly be true. On the face of it, what I was thinking was madness, and yet something had clicked into place, and I needed to check in order to be certain. And as I drove, it was as though my mind were already ahead of me, waiting there at the house, urging me onward to join it.
They’re all the same.
That’s why he won’t find it.
When I parked and got out, the street was empty. But, while it might have been my imagination, the air right then seemed to have the same off-kilter feel as it had on the day of the murder.
Once inside the house, I paused in the hall. At the top of the stairs, dust was turning slowly in the air, casually disturbed by the front door opening. The place was as silent as ever, but the heaviness in the air had taken on a different texture today. It was quieter and emptier, and it felt like there was a sadness to the house, as though somehow it knew the person who had lived here for so many years was gone now, and the building itself was grieving for the loss.
I was still nervous about whoever had delivered the doll, but the need to know had overtaken that. I went upstairs to my old room and spread the contents of the box out onto the table.
The magazine.
The book with Jenny’s name on the cover.
The notebooks.
I looked at those now. There were eight in total, and I’d paid little attention to them until now. My dream diary had been on top of the pile, the first one I’d opened, and I hadn’t been interested in looking through the others and reading all my miserable teenage attempts at writing. All the desultory attempts at storytelling I’d long since abandoned.
But now I picked one up and opened it.
Nothing.
Another.
Nothing.
Then I opened the third. And before me, I saw not my own handwriting, but Charlie’s tight, black, spidery crawl.
I closed it instinctively, my heart beating harder.
My mind returned to the first time the four of us had compared results, the lunchtime Charlie had performed the seemingly impossible trick of appearing to share James’s dream. How that day I’d noticed he and I had exactly the same brand of notebook.
It’s in the house now, Paul.
They’re all the same.
That’s why he won’t find it.
But Charlie’s diary was supposed to have disappeared with him. He and Billy both had theirs with them on the day of the murder—presumably as part of the ritual Charlie had devised. Which meant that I was holding something that vanished from the world at the same time he did. There was an impossible piece of magic in my hands.
Magic.
I scanned through some of the entries toward the end of the notebook. They were all variations on the same theme: Red Hands; the woods; Billy and James. Most of them were vague, but two entries stood out as being more specific than the others. There was a lengthy passage describing the dream in which he’d killed Goodbold’s dog, and further back, a similarly detailed entry about knocking on James’s door in the night. In both cases, of course, Charlie had known what he’d done in real life and had been able to be more precise.
I flicked back further, until I found the entry I was most interested in.
I am sitting with him in the woods.
It is very dark here, but I can tell he is wearing that old army jacket, the one with the weathered fabric on the shoulders that looks like feathers, like an angel that’s had his wings clipped down to stumps.
It was exactly as I remembered from reading it that lunchtime. Charlie had told James to pass me his dream diary so that I could see the truth for myself. Back then, I’d looked down at the same tight, black handwriting, with that day’s date recorded at the top, and the dream had been so close to what James had already described that it had seemed impossible for it to be a coincidence. And yet I hadn’t been able to explain how it had been accomplished.
Charlie’s trick.
I turned back a page and started reading.
I am sitting with him in the woods.
And then another.
I am sitting with him in the woods.
I kept flicking back. The entries for that whole week were all but identical. While Charlie had changed some of the words, the subject matter was exactly the same. In each one, a boy and a monster emerged from the woods and saw James in his backyard, looking back at them.
And after all these years, I finally understood.
Incubation.
Charlie had spent weeks seeding us with stories about the woods being haunted. Every weekend, he’d taken us in there, always insisting on entering them through James’s backyard. So it had been almost inevitable that all of us, including James, would dream about them eventually.
I thought about Jenny giving me the magazine. At the time, I’d imagined it had been a coincidence that she had brought it in on the same day I decided to seek her out and talk to her. But she hadn’t, of course; I’d gotten it backward. That was the day she’d given it to me simply because that was the day I’d spoken to her. She had brought it in every day, and whichever day I’d spoken to her, it would have seemed like a coincidence then too.
And Charlie had done something similar. He had prepared entry after entry, so that he had one ready for whenever James finally described something that was a close enough match.
It happened much sooner than I was expecting.
Frustration rolled through me. How easily I could have stopped everything back then, if only I’d realized. That lunchtime, the three of them had been watching me, waiting for my response to the diary entry, and I remembered how powerless I’d felt. The whole time, all I’d needed to do was turn back one single page.
And if I had, none of the rest of it would have happened.