Between

Two

Vivian was going to have to sleep soon, and she knew it, but she feared her dreams and where they might take her. Forty-eight hours and counting since she’d last slept. Deprivation hallucinations could be right at hand, or maybe they’d already happened and none of what she remembered from last night was real. The other alternative, the one that said schizophrenia was hereditary and maybe this was a psychotic break—that was a thought she refused to entertain.

Her body felt heavy, every movement an effort, like walking through knee-deep snow. The muscles in her shoulders and back ached from the physical exertion of chest compressions and CPR. Her eyes gritted and burned, blurring the world around her. But her brain refused to stop, running over the same problem like a frenzied hamster in a wheel.

Dragons. Mythological beasts, no matter what she might dream about them. It was impossible for a creature to follow her out of her dreams and into reality. Equally impossible that a sixteen-year-old boy could incinerate from the inside out while she stood by and watched it happen.

Again her hand went to the pendant, her talisman. Still there. Superstitious, yes—but it was always missing in her dreams, and there when she awoke. It reassured her that she could always tell the difference. Science, her goddess of choice, had failed her. The pendant? Never yet.

Pushing away dream fragments and the memories of last night, she forced herself to focus on tasks at hand. Watering plants. Straightening, sweeping, dusting. All dishes washed and put away, the stainless sink shined. Order and structure to keep chaos at bay.

It was a small apartment, kitchen and living area in one room, with doors leading off to the bathroom and bedroom. The furniture was all secondhand store specials, although she’d only bought things that appealed to her and so the mismatched array had a comfortable, cozy aspect that she was coming to love. A battered old sofa, sage green and heavy but soft and comfy and perfect for lying back with her feet up to read. An antique coffee table, scuffed and chipped, with lines that she liked. Kitchen table and chairs, also solid wood, scarred with years of use.

On one wall hung her framed poster print of Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere, the only artwork she possessed. As a child she had spent hours getting lost in the curves and strange realities of that drawing, and still it hung as a reminder to her of the fragile nature of reality, the need to guard carefully the borders of what Isobel had taught her as a child to call Wakeworld.

In front of the one window and above the front door hung dream catchers, gifts Isobel had given her. “Always guard against the Dreamworld, darling,” her mother had whispered. “You never know what might come through.”

All these years later the dream catchers went everywhere Vivian went, the only gift her mother had ever given her.

Memories were nearly as dangerous as dreams, and she pushed them away. If she wasn’t going to be sleeping, she needed to be doing. There were a couple of boxes still to unpack, and she moved on to that task. One was a box of books, all of her old favorites. She had an e-reader now and little room for a library, but there were some books she couldn’t part with. The dog-eared covers reminded her of long blissful hours curled up in various corners of her life, traveling with beloved characters to far distant worlds. Most were fantasies—Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Kay, Davidson. A few were remnants of her childhood—Little Women, National Velvet, Anne of Green Gables. So many more that she’d had to give away, each with a wrenching sense of loss.

Someday she would own a big house with all of the bookcases she needed. In the meantime, she had only one, doubling as storage for paper goods and a landing point for her landline phone. As she lined the books up on the shelf, she realized that the answering machine was blinking. For a minute she stood staring at it, blankly. Almost all calls went to her cell. When her finger pushed play, she half-expected a sales pitch and a pre-recorded message. Instead, Jared’s voice came on, smooth as silk, but with an undertone of little-boy-lost that tugged at her heart.

“Vivian—please. I miss you. Let me talk to you—you owe me that much. Tomorrow, all right? I’ll drive up. We can have lunch. I have something for you.”

In the silence after his voice clicked off she stood, feeling alone and small and suddenly unsure. It had made sense to end things with him, to take the job up here in this little town away from his offers of financial help and support. Away from Isobel.

All her life Vivian had been responsible for somebody else—her mother first, followed by a string of loser boyfriends and then finally Jared.

Jared was not a loser. In fact, if there was a definition of driven overachiever, he was it. At twenty-seven he had passed his bar exam and been recruited by an old-money law firm in his hometown of Spokane. “It’s a place to start,” he’d told her, eyes glowing with the thrill of the hunt. “You wait—I’ll get a job in L.A. or New York. Give me five years. We’ll be rich, Viv. You won’t have to work and you can shop at all of the best stores and dress to the nines…”

But she wanted to work. And she was quite comfortable in blue jeans and tennis shoes and abhorred the parties he dragged her to. On the other hand, nobody had ever tried to take care of her before, and it had felt safe and comforting to have someone else concerned about her well-being.

She was too tired to think about this. Too tired to think about anything, but the message had buzzed her body with adrenaline and pushed the possibility of sleep even further away. Without an awareness of ever making the decision, she slipped into her shoes and a sweater. There was a single bookstore in Krebston. She’d been planning to check it out, and now seemed as good a time as any. It would be good to buy a new book, something solid and real that she could hold in her hands and put on the shelf when she was through. Maybe a walk would put her thoughts in order and bring her to the place where she could sleep.

The sign on the door said A to Zee Books. In the glass a dual image: a reflection of Vivian’s own windblown self, and the inside of the store where a man sat on a stool behind the cash register. His head was bent over a book open on the counter, a fall of dark hair screening his face. All around him, books, stacked on the counter, in boxes on the floor, shelved in neat and orderly rows, spilling into towering stacks where there was no more room.

Something about the man’s hand, poised to turn the page, struck her as familiar. Standing on the other side of the glass, Vivian had a sense of déjà vu but could come to no true memory. The sensation unnerved her, and she might have bolted if he hadn’t looked up then. His eyes widened. His hand froze in the act of turning the page. She stared back through layers of reflection and unreality, as though both of them were caught out of time.

A slow smile spread over his face, crooked, forming a dimple in his right cheek. He slid off his stool and moved toward her.

Vivian opened the door. A gust of wind pushed her through and into the store, dry leaves scuttling around her feet.

“North wind,” the man said. “Trying to make itself at home.”

“The sun looked warm.”

“It’s October. In Krebston. You look half frozen.”

“I walked fast. It’s not that cold.” But she shivered as she spoke, wrapping her arms around herself for warmth.

“Sit for a minute; I’ll bring you a coffee.” He nodded toward the back corner of the store, where deep armchairs squared a low table holding a chess board. “It’s warmer back there.”

She hesitated, and again he flashed her a crooked grin that decided everything.

Breathing in the smell of books, Vivian walked past the loaded shelves and sank into one of the chairs, noticing for the first time an array of wind chimes and hanging sculptures suspended from the ceiling. They were made of wood and glass, ceramic and bone, an endless variety of weird and wonderful. Some were beautiful, others strange, and a few dark and almost forbidding. Above her head a flight of dragons soared, outspread wings in jeweled colors, each one set with a prism that caught the light and broke it up into rainbows. On the walls, hung above the book shelves, were paintings that rivaled her Escher in strangeness.

The man reappeared with two ceramic mugs. He set one down on the table and handed her the other. His hand brushed hers, the touch sending a flood of warmth up her arm, and she found herself gazing directly into his eyes. They were dangerous eyes, translucent amber agate, light filled. Grateful for an excuse to look away, Vivian bent her head over the steaming cup of coffee, no sugar, and with the perfect amount of cream.

“I’m Zee,” he said, folding his long body into the chair across from her and picking up his own mug. “Haven’t seen you in before—are you from around here?”

Again his hands caught at a forgotten memory, like an elusive word on the tip of the tongue. Big hands, built for strength, but they held the mug with a surprising delicacy. His voice, strange and familiar all at once, pulled her back to the moment, and she risked a glance at his face. Those eyes were watching her with an intensity that made her cheeks flame. She took a long swallow of scalding coffee and promptly choked, coughing and spilling a wave of coffee over her hand and into her lap.

He took the cup from her and set it down, waiting without comment until the paroxysm eased and then handing her a stack of napkins. Having something to do, a real embarrassment to deal with, eased her nerves a little and gave her time to lecture herself into a state of semicalm.

Neither of them spoke.

Somewhere a clock ticked off seconds in the silent room. No other sound but Vivian’s breathing, and Zee’s.

“That’s a fascinating pendant,” he said at last. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Do you mind if I have a closer look?”

Wordless, she held the pendant out and leaned toward him. Zee bent his head down to look. His breath was warm on her cheek. The scent of him—clean soap and wood, and a tang of turpentine—filled her nostrils.

She felt her breath quicken, hoped he couldn’t hear the rapid beating of her heart.

“A penguin in a dream web,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“My grandfather gave it to me.”

Vivian, her senses flooded with his nearness, with the memory of dream, found herself blurting out whatever came first to her less-than-functional brain. “He said it was my totem animal.”

“You don’t sound exactly happy about that.”

“A totem indicating OCD and conformity? Possibly accurate, but not how I’d like to think of myself.”

“A penguin doesn’t have to mean conformity.”

“The only other thing to think is cute and cuddly. Also not traits I aspire to.”

“Penguins are actually rather fierce. And then there’s the way they fly in water. Unique. I’ve also heard of a penguin or two that swam north while all the rest were heading south. Kinda blows the whole conform-and-follow-the-leader image.”

“You’re scrambling,” Vivian said, laughing a little. It felt good, small and dry as the laugh was, and a little of the tension drained out of her.

“I’m not. Here, just a minute…” He got up and wandered around the shelves, then came back with a small book, old, the cover water stained, the pages dog-eared. Spirit Guides and Totems. He flipped through the pages. “All right. Listen.”

PENGUIN TOTEM—THE SIGN OF THE DREAMER AND THE MYSTIC

If the penguin is your totem, you are most likely a vivid dreamer and may receive messages while in the dream state. The penguin can lead you from one reality to another, just as he is able to shift smoothly from the world of air to the world of water and back again. Water symbolizes astral consciousness and is an important symbol of the dream dimension.

Silence. “Oh, come on. You can’t really believe that stuff.”

“Actually, I do.” His eyes challenged her, and again she looked away, finding a new topic of conversation in the gallery lining the walls. Strange and surreal, those paintings. A flavor of Escher about them, and something else, an unsettling echo of something known but forgotten.

“Are the paintings yours?”

“How did you know?”

“You have paint on your cuticles and you smell a little like oil paint and cleaner. It’s a good smell,” she added quickly, lest he take offense, and then wished she hadn’t. “Where did you get the ideas?”

“Dreams. Ever had the feeling that dreams might be real? Or that we might be dreaming when we think we’re awake?”

This struck too close to home. “Dreams are chemical reactions in our brains. No more, no less.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“It’s what the textbooks say.”

“And what do you say?”

Something about him challenged her for the truth. She hesitated, played with the coffee mug. “I—yes—maybe. But science says—”

“Once we all believed the world was flat. I’ve had dreams I certainly can’t explain. Are you telling me you haven’t?”

She flushed, and then admitted, “All right, yes. I’ve dreamed things before they happened. Dreamed people before I met them. And I’ve felt, sometimes, like what happens in a dream feels more real than what happens when I’m awake. But this makes no sense.”

None of it made sense. Dragons. Agate-eyed warriors who turned out to be bookstore-owning painters.

“Science isn’t right about everything,” Zee went on. We want it to be—everything cut and dried and logical. But think about this—for the entire history of this planet, until the last few years, really—people have believed in dreams. Portents and omens and oracles. The aboriginal peoples and Dreamtime. Even in our culture, people buy dream catchers—”

“Those are decorative.”

“Sure they are. And you really think that’s the only reason? I think underneath all of our carefully acquired logic and rationality, we are afraid that dreams might cause us harm. We fear them. And so even symbolically we like to surround ourselves with things that keep them out.”

He was speaking to the heart of her now, the dilemma that had been with her since childhood. Wakeworld and Dreamworld and Between—worlds her mother talked about incessantly as though they were real. Isobel was crazy, Vivian knew this now, but as a child she had believed and feared. The fear was still with her, bone deep, and at the depths of her psyche it lay side by side with a long-buried belief that dreams were indeed as real as waking, and maybe even more so.

“But they can’t hurt us, the dreams. It all happens in our heads. I believe they affect us—how could they not? Such an emotional impact might change our decisions or our actions. But to reach out into the real world and touch us…”

Vivian shivered. A deep cold enveloped her. Her mouth had gone so dry that she could hardly swallow, and the room and the man across the table seemed suddenly far away, as though she were looking at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

“I’ve always remembered something my grandmother told me when I was a little kid. I’d had some nightmare or other, and I was sure the monster had followed me into waking and was hiding under my bed. No way I’d have ever told my parents I was scared of a dream, but Grandmother happened to be visiting. It was like she sensed it. She came into my room where I was hiding under the covers. She said…” He furrowed his brow, remembering. “She said, ‘Don’t be frightened, little one. The Dreamshifter guards the portals of the dreams. The monster can’t get through, as long as he is watching.’”

“Dreamshifter.” The word buzzed around in her head, meaningless but full of import.

Zee touched the back of her hand, his fingers warm against cold skin. “Are you okay? You look pale all of a sudden.”

“Very tired,” she managed. Her lips were numb. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

“Well, you should sleep. You want a ride home?”

She did. With dismay, she discovered that what she wanted was for him to drive her home, and then come into the apartment, make love to her, and hold her while she fell asleep. She shook her head, then levered herself to her feet. “I need the exercise.”

Zee also got to his feet. Taller than she was by a good foot, an intoxicating mix of muscle and gentleness and quiet strength.

Breathing, that was important. That, and getting away, getting home, before she betrayed any more of herself to a man who was a total stranger, no matter how attractive or how often dreamed of.

“Let me lend you some books, before you go. I have some good ones on dreams.”

“I thought this was a store. Where people buy things.”

He laughed. “Well, it is that. But I have a collection of older books that nobody in Krebston is ever going to buy. There is one, at least, on lucid dreaming.”

“I couldn’t—”

“It will give me a reason to see you again. You know—you never even told me your name.”

Her heart was racing beyond all reason; her knees were weak. She fought back a ridiculous urge to push a stray lock of hair back from his face, to run her hand along the strong line of his jaw, touch the hint of a cleft in his chin.

“I’m Vivian,” she heard herself say. “And I’d love to see the books—”

A smile lit up his face, and there was that dimple again. “Maybe we can talk about them when you’ve read them. Hang on a minute; they’re in the back.”

He vanished through a door into the back of the store, returning a moment later with a small stack of books—a large, slim volume, and three that were smaller and fatter. Pulling out a bag from under the counter, he slid the books into it and handed it to her.

There was something new in his eyes, a thing she couldn’t read, as she took the bag from him. “I’ll bring them back soon,” she said.

“I’ll be waiting.”