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November 26 - December 4, 2023
to the magicians who woke me from my thousand-year sleep I will not be clapped in a hood, Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist, Now I have learnt to be proud Hovering over the wood In the broken mist Or tumbling cloud. —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “THE HAWK” If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. —MARCEL PROUST, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, VOL. II Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? —M. C. ESCHER, “ON BEING A GRAPHIC ARTIST”
Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team.
Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
It was a sharp October, a wild October, one of those fretful spans of time that climbs into your skin and flits around. It was two months after the fall semester had begun. The trees were all brittle and grasping. The drying leaves were skittish. Winter yowled round the doorways at night until wood fires drove it away for another few hours.
Caomhán Browne had been what the Moderators called a Zed. This is what it meant to be a Zed: Sometimes, when they dreamt, they woke up with a thing they’d been dreaming about in their hands.
The little Kerry farm was edged by a tiny, mossy wood. It was beautiful, but in between the trees, the air hummed even more than in the cottage. It was not exactly that they couldn’t breathe in this atmosphere. It was more like they couldn’t think, or like they could think too much.
“There are stains that spread faster than you drive.
The second reason why traveling as a dreamer was fraught was the nightwash:
It was a fairly new consequence for him, and all he knew was that if he waited too long between manifesting dreams or spent too long away from the western Virginia foothills where he was born, black ooze began to run from his nose. Then his eyes. Then his ears.
The wind felt crafty and inventive as it worked under his collar, and his pulse felt as fast and streaky as the thin November clouds above.
Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?
We used to hear the stars, too. When people stopped talking, there was silence.
If you’ve ever looked into a fire and been unable to look away, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the mountains and found you’re not breathing, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the moon and felt tears in your eyes, it’s that. It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning.
Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.
Gansey texted back: don’t make me get on a plane I’m currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon
On weekdays, he gave in to the impulse of adding to his strange herds. On weekends, he spent Mass regretfully apologizing to God for his hubris.
Gasoline was a dream creature that was cooler in theory than in practice—an enormous, minivan-sized boar, with small, intelligent eyes and wiry, metallic hair. If it galloped on hard surfaces, sparks came up from its hooves. If it was surprised, it dissipated into a cloud of smoke. When it cried out, it sounded like a bird.
“Ink on your skin means you’re hiding things,” he told Ronan.
Declan Lynch knew he was boring. He’d worked very hard to be that way, after all. It was a magic trick he didn’t expect any prize from but survival, even as he looked at other lives and imagined them his. He didn’t fool himself. He knew what he was allowed to do and to want and to put in his life. He knew Jordan Hennessy didn’t belong. But still, when he came back from the National Gallery of Art to his empty town house, he closed the door behind him and for a moment he just leaned against it, eyes closed, pretending—no, not even pretending. He just didn’t think. For one second of one minute
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But joy is a small, tenacious crop, especially in soil that hasn’t grown any for a long time, and so it lingered with him as he checked his watch to see when Matthew was due back from soccer and hung up his coat and his keys and toed off his shoes.
It was a strange feeling to be studied after years of attempting to avoid it.
“The hawk of Achill was the oldest man in Ireland, so goes the story. He was born Fintan mac Bóchra in a place far away from Ireland, and when Noah’s flood threatened, he fled to Ireland with two other men and fifty women. Noah’s flood washed away his companions and the foolish world of men, but Fintan transformed himself into a salmon and lived.”
After the flood receded, he could’ve become a man again, but he’d acquired a taste for worlds beside the one he’d been born into. Having learned the world of men and the world of fish, he transformed himself into a hawk, and he pitched through the skies for the next five thousand years, becoming the wisest man in Ireland.”
“What does a dream want?” Ronan opened his eyes. “To live without their dreamer.”
“You and the big D. Declan.” She tried out the word again as she picked up the laminated menu card. Everything you could want as long as what you wanted was breakfast food. “I don’t know how you don’t just say his name all the time. It’s like chocolate in your mouth, isn’t it?” He regarded her with unimpressed silence. He had a judgmental silence that said far more than words. This particular silence conveyed that he thought it was stupid that she was blustering when he was being earnest, don’t fucking waste his time. Hennessy raised an eyebrow and shot back her own silence, which was less
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“Bryde told me to stop saying that,” Ronan said. “Asking if something in my dreams is real. He said for dreamers, it’s always real, because we belong in both worlds. Waking and sleeping. One’s not more true than the other.”
The raven took flight, her wings audible as they beat the air. Hennessy watched it all with some amazement. She and Ronan had been out of place while hiking, yes, but he was not out of place here. He belonged in this strange lush forest with his strange dark bird. “You dreamt this place,” Hennessy said. “Sort of.” “Sort of?” “I had a dream, and after it, Lindenmere was here,” Ronan said. “But I think I might have just dreamt of it where it existed somewhere else, and then my dream was just the doorway for it. It’s a forest because that’s what my imagination could hold for it. It was limited by
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“I let Lindenmere be more of itself, whatever it was in that other place.” “And what it is over there is dangerous.” “Dangerous things can protect themselves,” Ronan said.
It was like a devil’s bargain, a fairy dance. Ronan Lynch stood there, dressed all in dark colors, only his eyes gleaming with color, his hand held out to her, glimmering lights drifting down around him. Come away. He didn’t say it, but Lindenmere remembered the words for her, somehow, as if he had. “Don’t think, Hennessy,” he said. “Just be.”
Lindenmere was beautiful and complicated in ways that the real world was not. Air and music were two different things in the real world; in Lindenmere, they were not always. Water and flowers were similarly confused in this forest. Hennessy felt the truth of it as they walked. There were creatures you didn’t want to meet in person if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. There were places you might get trapped forever if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. It was feral and confusing, but in the end, it followed one rule: Ronan Lynch. His safety, his desires, his thoughts. That was Lindenmere’s only true
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He didn’t have it in him to love another dream. It hurt too bad. Loving anything did.
“Just a little thing,” Hennessy said. She opened her hands. A tiny golden light slowly lifted from her palms. Out of the corner of one’s eye, it was just a light. But if you looked at it close enough, it burned with a tiny, almost-not-there emotion: hope.
I need something that will get there. Something secret. I’m trusting you. Give me what I need.” Something dangerous, like you, he thought. And like you, the forest whispered back.
Childhood was the three of them tearing through the woods and fields around the Barns, setting things on fire and digging holes and wrestling.
