The Dream Thieves

There was never a chance Ronan wasn’t coming with.

“SOMETHING DISTASTEFUL!” Blue roared back. She reappeared at the door, her wardrobe essentially unchanged but for the addition of crochet tights and green rubber boots. “What are we doing, by the way?”

Home, Ronan thought. I’m going home.

“Well,” Gansey said slowly, as thunder rumbled once more, “the illegal part is that we’re going to Ronan’s family’s property, which he’s not allowed to do.”

Ronan flashed his teeth at her. “And the distasteful part is that we’re burying a body.”

Ronan had not been to the Barns in over a year, even in his dreams.

It was as he remembered it from countless summer afternoons: the two stone pillars half-hidden in ivy, tangled banks like a wall around the property, the oaks huddled close on either side of the pitted gravel driveway. The gray sky above made everything greens and blacks, forest and shade, growing and mysterious. The effect was to give the entrance to the Barns a sort of privacy. A reclusiveness.

As they ascended the drive, rain spattered on the BMW’s windshield. Thunder rumbled. Ronan navigated the car up over a crest through the oak trees, around a tight turn, and there — a great sloping expanse, pure green, sheltered by trees on all sides. Once upon a time, cattle had grazed in these front pastures, cattle of every color. That herd, lovely as fairy animals, still populated Ronan’s dreams, though in stranger fields. He wondered what had happened to the real cattle.

In the backseat, Blue and Adam craned their necks, looking at the approaching house. It was homely, unimpressive, a farmhouse that had been added on to every few decades. It was the namesake barns scattered through the saturated hills that were memorable, most of them chalk-white and tin-roofed, some of them still standing, some of them collapsing. Some were long and skinny livestock barns, others broad hay barns topped with pointy-hatted cupolas. There were ancient stone outbuildings and new, flat-roofed equipment sheds, still-rank goat houses and long-empty dog kennels. They dotted the fields as if they’d grown from them: smaller ones clustered like mushrooms, larger ones standing apart.

Over them all was the troubled sky, huge and purple with rain. Every color was deeper, truer, better. This was the reality, and last year had been the dream.

There was one light on in the farmhouse, the light to the sitting room. It was always on.

Am I really here? Ronan wondered.

Surely he would wake up soon and find himself again exiled in Monmouth Manufacturing or in the backseat of his car or lying on the floor beside Adam’s bed at St. Agnes. In the oppressive light, the Barns was so green and beautiful that he felt sick.

In the rearview mirror, he caught a glimpse of Adam, his expression dreamy and ill, and then of Blue, her fingertips pressed to the glass as if she wanted to touch the damp grass.

The gravel parking area was empty, the home nurse nowhere in evidence. Ronan parked beside a plum tree laden with unpicked fruit. Once, he’d had a dream that he’d bitten into one of the fruits, and juice and seeds had exploded from inside. Another where the fruit bled and creatures came to lap it up before they burrowed under his skin, sweet-scented parasites.

When Ronan opened the door, the car was immediately filled with the damp-earth, green-walled, mold-stone scent of home.

“It looks like another country,” Blue said.

It was another country. It was a country for the young, a country where you died before you got old. Climbing out, their feet sank into the summer-soft turf beside the gravel. Fine rain caught in their hair. The drops murmured on the leaves of the surrounding trees, an ascending hum.

The loveliness of the place couldn’t even be marred by the knowledge that this was the place Ronan had found his father’s body, and this was the car Ronan had found him lying near. Like Monmouth Manufacturing, the Barns was transformed utterly by the changing light. The body had been found on a cool, dark morning, and this was a shaggy, gray afternoon. So the memory became only a briefly noted thought, analytical rather than emotional.

The only reality was this: He was home.

How badly he wanted to stay.

A few minutes later, standing at the open trunk, they all realized neither Gansey nor Ronan had considered the plan deeply enough to procure a shovel.

“Einstein?” Ronan addressed Adam.

“Barn?” suggested Adam, coming awake. “Tools?” “Oh yeah. This way.”

Climbing over a black four-board fence, they set off across the fields toward one of the main barns. The atmosphere encouraged silence. Adam took a few hurried steps to walk beside Blue, but neither spoke. On Ronan’s shoulder, Chainsaw flapped to keep her balance. She was getting heavy, this dream of his. Beside Ronan, Gansey’s head was ducked against the rain, his face pensive. He’d made this walk enough times himself, before.

How many times had Ronan made this walk? It could have been a year ago, five years ago.

Ronan was filled with a burst of fury at Declan, enforcer of his father’s will. He couldn’t have his father back, probably would never have his mother back. But if he was allowed to come back here — it wouldn’t be the same, but it would be bearable.

Chainsaw saw the strange thing first. She remarked, “Kreck.”

Ronan stopped.

“What’s that?” he asked. A dozen yards away, a smooth brown object sat in the midst of all the green. It was waist-high in size and mountainous in texture.

Dubiously, Blue asked, “Is that . . . a cow?”

It was obvious once she had said it. It was certainly a cow, lying down as cattle do in the rain. And it was certainly one of the cattle that had occupied this pasture before Niall Lynch had died. Ronan couldn’t quite work out how it was still here.

Adam made a face. “Is it dead?”

Ronan pointed to the cow’s slowly moving side as he walked around it. Now he could see her finely sculpted face and the moisture around the nostrils. Her large black eyes were half-lidded. Both he and Chainsaw leaned in, heads identically cocked. When Ronan waved a hand in front of the cow’s eyes, she didn’t move.

“Non mortem,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes, “somni fratrem.”

Blue whispered, “What?”

Adam translated, “Not death, but his brother, sleep.” Gansey, a bit of the gallows in his voice, advised, “Poke its eye.” “Gansey!” Blue said.

Ronan did not poke the cow’s eye, but he did brush a finger through her soft, unblinking eyelashes. Gansey held a palm in front of the cow’s nostrils.

“It is breathing.”

Huddled close, Blue stroked the cow’s nose, leaving dark marks on the wet hair. “Poor thing. What do you think’s wrong with it?”

Ronan wasn’t certain there was anything wrong with it. It didn’t look ill, aside from its lack of movement. It didn’t smell terrible. And Chainsaw didn’t seem abnormally distressed, although she did press her body against the side of Ronan’s head as a warning to not set her down anywhere near it.

“There’s a metaphor for the American public in here,” Gansey murmured darkly, “but it escapes me at the moment.”

Blue said, “Let’s just go on before Gansey has time to say something that makes me hate him.”

They left the cow behind and continued on to the largest of the barns. The big sliding door was worm-eaten and rotted near the bottom, and the metal edging was rusted.

Ronan put his hand on the uneven surface of the door handle. Out of habit, his palm memorized the feel of it. Not the idea of it, but the real sensation of it, the texture and shape and temperature of the metal, everything he’d need to bring it back from a dream.

“Wait,” Adam said, wary. “What’s that smell?”

The air was colored with a warm, claustrophobic odor— not unpleasant, but undeniably agricultural. It was not the smell of a barn that had been used in the past; it was one of a barn currently in use.

Frowning, Ronan slid open the creaking, massive door. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust.

“Oh,” said Gansey.

Here was the rest of the herd. Dozens of cattle were dark silhouettes in the watery light through the door. There was not so much as a twitch over the clatter of the door opening. There was just the sound of several dozen very large animals breathing, and over all of it, the shushing of the light rain on the metal roof.

“Sleep mode,” Gansey said, at the same time that Blue said, “Hypnosis.”

Ronan’s heart beat unevenly. There was a raw potential to the sleeping herd. Like someone with the correct word could rouse a stampede.

“Is this our fault, too?” Blue whispered. “Like the power outtages?”

Adam looked away.

“No,” Ronan answered, certain that this sleeping herd wasn’t because of the ley line. “This is something else.”

Gansey said, “Not to sound like Noah, but this is giving me the creeps. Let’s find a shovel and get out of here.”

Feet scuffing through sawdust, they wound their way through the motionless animals to a small equipment room made gray by the rain. Ronan found a spade. Adam picked up a snow shovel. Gansey tested a post-hole digger’s weight as if checking the balance of a sword.

After a moment, Blue said, “Did you really grow up here, Ronan?”

“In this barn?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

He started to answer, but pain welled up, sudden and shocking. The only way he could get the sentiment out was by drowning the words with acid. It came out sounding like he hated the place. Like he couldn’t wait to get away. Mocking and cruel, he said, “Yes. This was my castle.”

“Wow,” she replied, as if he hadn’t been sarcastic. Then she whispered, “Look!”

Ronan followed her gaze. Where the corrugated roof imperfectly met the edge of the finished wall, a dusty brown bird was tucked away in a nest. Its chest looked black, bloody, but a closer look revealed that it was a trick of the dim light. Its chest plumage was a peacock’s metallic emerald. Like the cattle, its eyes were open, its head unmoving. Ronan’s pulse surged again.

On his shoulder, Chainsaw crouched low, pressing against his neck, a reaction to his reaction rather than to the other bird.

“Touch it,” Blue whispered. “See if it’s alive, too.”

“One of you two Poverty Twins should touch it,” Ronan said. “I touched the last one.”

Her eyes blazed. “What did you just call me?”

“You heard me.”

“Gansey,” she said.

He put down his post-hole digger. “You told me you wanted to fight your Ronan battles on your own.”

With a roll of his eyes, Adam dragged over a chair and investigated. “It’s breathing, too. Same as the cows.”

“Now check for eggs,” Ronan said.

“Screw you.”

They were all a little uneasy. It was impossible to tell if this slumber was natural or supernatural, and without that knowledge, it didn’t seem impossible that it wouldn’t happen to them, too.

Gansey said, “Are we the only things left awake?”