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I finally found my voice and screamed. He stumbled backwards, clutching one of the ceiling beams to keep from losing his balance in the air.
“Impossible,” he murmured.
I screamed again. The sweet relief of Mother’s hurried footsteps echoed through the loft and the orange glow from her candle slipped through the cracks in the trapdoor to fill the room with faint candlelight.
“What’s wrong?” Mother’s voice, fraught with panic.
“Someone—in my room—”
He instantly disappeared with a sizzlingcrack, just as Mother poked her head into the loft. Her candle chased away the remaining shadows, and in the shuddering pale light, all traces of spiders, webs, and floating intruders vanished.
Mother sat on the edge of my bed and I immediately folded myself in her arms, shaking. She stiffened at first before gently stroking my hair. “What happened?”
The nightmare hovered over my senses, distorting what was and wasn’t real. I could still feel the prickling spiders’ legs, their sticky webs immobilizing me, but that stranger… “In my room. Watching me. He—” I clung to her more tightly.
“Where was he?”
I shakily pointed to the ceiling corner. “Up there. He was—” I wasn’t exactly surewhathe’d been doing. He’d appeared to be sewing strange shadowy plants together into some sort of quilt, which had manipulated my dream as I’d experienced it. Was he one of the dream creators Stardust had mentioned?
Mother caressed my brow with surprising tenderness. “It was just a nightmare, Eden.”
Then how could I have seen that boy even after the nightmare ended? And if he hadn’t been part of my nightmare, what would keep him from returning? My closed window had done nothing to bar his entrance.
I shivered. “But he was so real…”
“I know dreams oftenseemreal, but surely you’re old enough to tell the difference between them and reality?”
I shook my head. Mother couldn’t understand the significance of my finally experiencing my first dream. “You don’t understand, he had to have been real. I’ve told you before I can’t dream.”
She pursed her lips to suppress a sigh. “We’ve been over this. It’s impossible not to dream; you just don’t remember them.”
“You don’t dream either.” The words escaped before I could stop them. Mother stiffened and her hand froze against my hair mid-stroke. For a moment she didn’t speak before she hooked her finger beneath my chin and raised my gaze to meet hers, the motherly concern that had previously filled her eyes transformed into suspicion.
“Everybody dreams.”
I remained silent. I’d kept my secret dream-watching ability from Mother too long to ruin it now.
Eyes bright, Mother pulled away and marched to the corner I’d pointed to. There she immediately disregarded the floor and looked up at the ceiling, studying it with as much concentration as Stardust searching for clues before striding towards the window to peer out and search the sky.
My heart hammered as I watched her, unsure what to make of her actions. For one who’d always abhorred magic, she seemed to suspect the intruder had possessed some and seemed eager to uncover it, confirming she was likely part of the world where the intruder had come from.
After a few more minutes of a half-hearted examination of the floor she straightened. “There’s nothing. It must have only been a nightmare.“ She kissed my forehead, something she hadn’t done since I was a child. “I hope you have a more restful night. See you in the morning.”
Had it really only been a nightmare? There was one way to know for certain. I waited until Mother descended the ladder before I pattered to my shelf, already knowing what I would find.
It was empty, my bottled dream snatched away in the night, which meant that the intruder had been no dream, but instead very real.
Chapter 6
The haunting memory of my nightmare and the stranger’s presence in my room made sleep impossible. The night stretched endlessly before dawn finally penetrated the horizon to dispel the unsettling darkness. At the first hint of light I groggily climbed from bed and snuck outside, relieved to escape my shadowy room into the bright morning sunshine, which bathed the trees and fields surrounding our cottage in an almost eerie glow that did little to dissipate the chilling memories from last night.
In my peripheral vision, I suddenly caught sight of a floating nightmare, still plump and vivid, a murky green color that was almost sinister. With horror I realized it was mine. I hastily yanked my gaze away; I never wanted to relive such a unsettling vision ever again.
I fought to ignore the trailing dream as I headed for the village, a trek which felt longer when within every shadow I thought I saw the green eyes of that mysterious young man who’d given me my first nightmare, watching me. I hastily tore my gaze away from the trees with a shiver and pulled my shawl more tightly around my shoulders. The dreams that awaited me in the village would be a welcome respite after the lingering nightmare; I could still feel hundreds of spiders crawling over me and the sticky webs of their cobweb prison.
I arrived at my dream-watching tree just as dawn fully broke across the sky in hues of rose and gold. Up in my usual perch I crept further along the low-hanging bough to peer down to the village below. After my experiences the night before I hadn’t planned on capturing another dream, yet that promise evaporated at seeing them now, cheerful lights glistening against the grey morning light.
Only a few villagers were awake at this hour, leaving very few dreams to choose from, but several floated below my perch, their cheery glow beckoning me to explore.
