Overhead, a streetlight buzzed and then went out. It had not been raining for several hours, but the air still felt as charged as a thunderstorm. Ronan wondered where his night horror was heading. He said, “OK, magician, if I’m driving while you’re whacked out, how am I going to know where to go?”
“I guess I’ll try to stay present enough to tell you where to go.”
“Is that possible?”
Adam shrugged; the definitions of possible and impossible were negotiable these days. He leaned to offer his arm to Chainsaw. She leapt on, flapping to balance as his sleeve twisted under her weight, and tilted her head as Adam carefully stroked the fine feathers by her beak. He said, “Never know until we try. You up for it?”
Ronan jingled his car keys. As if he was ever not in the mood to drive. He jerked his chin towards the Hondayota. “Are you going to lock your shitbox?”
Adam said, “No point. Hooligans got in anyway.”
The hooligan in question smiled thinly.
They drove.
Adam jerked awake at the sound of a car door closing.
He was in his terrible little car – was he supposed to be in his car?
Persephone settled herself in the passenger seat, her froth of pale hair cascading over the console on to the driver’s seat. She carefully placed the toolbox that had been on the seat on the floor between her feet.
Adam squinted against the colourless new dawn – was it supposed to be daytime? – his eyes still pinched with exhaustion. It felt like only a few minutes had passed since he’d emerged from his night shift at the factory. The drive home had felt like too enormous an undertaking without a few minutes of sleep; it felt no more doable now.
He couldn’t understand if Persephone was really there or not. She must be; her hair was tickling his bare arm.
“Take out the cards,” she ordered in her small voice.
“What?”
“Time for a lesson,” Persephone said mildly.
His fatigued brain slid out from under him; something about all of this struck him as not entirely true. “Persephone – I — I’m too tired to think.”
The thin morning light illuminated Persephone’s secret smile. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
As he reached for the cards, fumbling into the door pocket he used to keep them in, it struck him. “You’re dead.”
She nodded in agreement.
“This is a memory,” he said.
She nodded again. Now it made sense. He was wandering in a recollection of one of his early lessons with Persephone. The goals of those sessions were always the same: Escape his conscious mind. Discover his unconscious. Expand that to the collective unconscious. Look for the threads that connected all things. Rinse and repeat. In the beginning, he had never got past the first two. Every session had been spent trying to lure himself out of his own concrete thoughts.
Adam’s fingers scraped the bare bottom of the door pocket. The truth of where the cards had been in his memory was bumping up against the knowledge of where he stored them in the present. That window had started to leak after Persephone’s death, and he had begun to keep the cards in the glove box instead to prevent damage.
“Why are you here? Is this a dream?” he asked, then corrected himself. “No. I’m scrying. I’m looking for something.”
And just like that, he was alone in the car.
He was not only alone, but he was in the passenger seat where she had been, holding a single tarot card in his hand. The art on the card was sketchy and scribbly and looked a little bit like a pile of hornets. Actually, it might have been a face. It was unimportant. What was he looking for? It was difficult to navigate the space between conscious and unconscious. Too much focus, and he would lose the meditation. Too little, and he would lose the purpose.
He let his mind wander slightly closer to his present.
Electronic music bled into his awareness, reminding him that his body was actually in Ronan’s car. In this other place, it was easy to tell that the music was the sound of Ronan’s soul. Hungry and prayerful, it whispered of dark places, old places, fire and sex.
Adam was grounded by the pulsing backbeat and the memory of Ronan’s closeness. The Devil. No, a demon. The knowledge was not there, and then it was.
North, he said.
A ring of glowing white surrounded everything. It was so bright that it seared his vision if he looked directly at it; he had to keep his gaze focused ahead. A very faraway part of him, a part that thudded with electric beat, remembered suddenly that it was the light of the phone charger. That was the part of his brain that was still present enough to whisper directions to Ronan.
Turn right.
Cabeswater muttered into his deaf ear. It whispered of taking apart, of disowning, of violence, of nothingness. A backwards step of self-doubt, a lying promise that you knew would hurt you later, a knowledge that you were going to get hurt and you probably deserved it. Demon, demon, demon.
Go go go
Somewhere, a dark car raced along a night road. A hand gripped the wheel, leather bands looped over the wrist bone. The Greywaren. Ronan. In this dreamplace, all times were the same time, and so Adam had a strange, lucid beat of reliving the moment Ronan had offered his hand to help Adam up from the asphalt. Stripped of context, the physical sensations exploded: the surprising shock of heat from that skin-to-skin grip; the soft hiss of the bracelets against Adam’s wrist; the sudden bite of possibility —
Everything in his mind was ringed by the searing white light.
The deeper Adam moved through the music and the white-ringed dark, the closer he got to some sort of hidden truth about Ronan. It was hidden in things Adam already knew, half-glimpsed behind a forest made of thoughts. For a bare moment, Adam thought he nearly understood something about Ronan, and about Cabeswater – about Ronan-and-Cabeswater – but it slid away. He darted after it, deeper into whatever stuff Cabeswater’s thoughts were made of. Here, Cabeswater hurled images at him: a vine strangling a tree, a cancerous growth, a creeping rot.