“She didn’t go crazy,” Cole says. “She ran into the mountains and barricaded herself in a cave.”
“Isn’t that covered under ‘going crazy’?” Chandra asks. “She chases people off her property with a shotgun, screaming bloody murder. I heard she has all booby traps set up.”
“She didn’t go crazy,” I say. “She just . . . couldn’t finish.”
The truth is, no one knows the reason Olivia Kane stopped writing. She isn’t in the mountains, and she doesn’t chase people off her property with a shotgun. As far as I know, she just turned into a hermit. Vanished into the countryside of North Carolina one day and never came back. Once she disappeared, reporters couldn’t even get a reason out of her. Plenty of people have heard about the fandom, at least. It ripped itself apart through arguments over speculations about a finale that would never come.
“They’re my favorite books,” I say. “You should read them.”
“Books written by a hermit lady in the mountains?” Cole hops up right away. “Let’s see if someone has them around here. Hey, Abigail!” He trots to the girl stocking books—sushi girl from Halloween—and starts up a conversation. Abigail nods at something Cole says and takes him over to a corner of the store. He comes back with a stack of all four Children of Hypnos books in the original hardback covers, though a little worn from their previous owner. “Check it out,” Cole says. “They had two full shelves of them back there.”
Wallace picks up the top one and reads the inside flap.
“Nightmare hunters, huh?” he says. He closes it again and looks at the front cover. A decorative illustration of a war hammer inlaid with the symbol of Hypnos, a closed eye.
I pick up the second book. On the cover is a great sword. “Yes! So the premise is like, strong dreams and nightmares can cross over into the real world, and we need these people, dreamhunters, to send them back to the dream world. It’s an alternate-universe Earth where this whole nightmare hunting system is embedded in society; there’s a Hypnos government, and the dreamhunters are like special agents, and they’re stronger and faster than normal people but they don’t live as long, and they rarely sleep. They have these cool weapons too, like on the covers—weapons they grow from the dream world, that match their personalities. Oh, and my favorite character—okay, I have a lot of favorites, but the main favorite—he never sleeps, and his dream world is this Frankenstein lab, and his nightmares are huge poisonous monstrosities.”
Wallace cracks open the first book and starts reading. Cole and Chandra stare at me.
“That is the most I have ever heard you say at once,” Chandra says.
I slide a little in my seat, yanking the front of my sweatshirt to get air. I only ever spoke about Children of Hypnos with other fans online. Never anyone in real life. I didn’t know all that would come out.
“I’m buying these,” Wallace announces, and takes the stack of books up to the counter with his wallet.
While he’s paying, Cole asks Chandra what she’s working on and she shows us a picture of Damien and Rory from Monstrous Sea vigorously making out. Cole scowls.
“Why do you have to put my favorite character in gay situations?” he asks.
Chandra rolls her eyes and proceeds to list off all the times in the comic there were very canon undertones to legitimize Damien and Rory’s very fanon gay relationship.
“Damien’s already bisexual, my Damien-Amity ship sank back in August when LadyConstellation said it was never going to happen, and Damien makes eyes at Rory ALL THE TIME. And even if there weren’t legitimate reasons,” she goes on, “being gay doesn’t make them different people. They’re still the same characters. Stop whining.”
I love it when they get in arguments like this. Canon vs. fanon, how they think the story should go, how they think it should end, which characters are the best, which places they’d want to live in. It’s like reading the comments without ever seeing the trolls—instant reader feedback from people who actually like the comic and are active in its fandom.
Wallace comes back with the books and boxes me in again. I put my back to the wall and sink down, pulling my feet up onto the seat. My toes brush Wallace’s thigh. I start to scoot them back when his hand comes down and rests over my shoelaces. The heat from his palm shoots up my ankle, my leg, makes my stomach turn to water. He doesn’t look at my foot when he does it, just like he didn’t look back at me when he took my hand at Halloween. When he releases my foot a moment later, it’s like touching it wasn’t even a big deal in the first place. He’s already back to reading the Children of Hypnos book. Cole and Chandra don’t realize anything has happened. No one else realizes anything has happened. Wallace doesn’t even act like he does.
Just me. This tight feeling in my chest is only me.
Sato stood behind her. He held out his hand, as always, and as always, Amity didn’t shake it. Nocturnians didn’t shake hands; meeting someone’s eye was considered a more than adequate greeting. Sato knew this, of course, and smiled as he lowered his hand.
“Is there someone like me out there?” she asked.
Sato sat across from her, back straight, hands on his legs. He wore Alliance white and green, with the colonel’s gold sword pinned to either shoulder. “I’m honestly surprised it took you so long to ask.”
“Are the stories true? Is he out there murdering and enslaving people with the Scarecrow’s power, and I’m the only one who can stop him?”
Sato took another second to collect himself, then said, “As far as we know, there are no other creatures like the Scarecrow and the Watcher on Orcus. You and Faust are two of a kind. You’ve seen the Watcher’s healing capabilities. It’s an unconscious thing, like breathing, and in the years we’ve been studying Faust, we haven’t found a limit to it. Our best theory, gathered from the Nocturnian stories and from an informant of ours, says only the hosts can mortally wound each other.”
Monstrous Sea Private Message
10:11 p.m. 9 - Dec - 16
rainmaker: I never knew these books were about depression.
MirkerLurker: ??
rainmaker: Children of Hypnos. I just started the second one.
MirkerLurker: They’re about depression? I guess it’s been longer than I thought since the last time I read them.
rainmaker: The whole thing is about Emery dealing with her depression. All the dreamhunters are depressed—they live short lives and they don’t sleep and they spend all their time killing other people’s nightmares because their dedication to their job is all they have. Klaus is your favorite character, right? He’s the most depressed of them all.