They worked on Glendower and Monmouth Manufacturing for months. The first week of June, Gansey found a headless statue of a bird with king carved on its belly in Welsh. The second week, they wired a refrigerator in the upstairs bathroom, right next to the toilet. The third week, someone killed Niall Lynch. The fourth week, Ronan moved in.
Fixing a cereal-box front porch into place, Gansey asked, “What was the first thing you took out? Did you always know?”
Ronan found himself pleased to be quizzed. “No. It was a bunch of flowers. The first time.”
He remembered that dream — a haunted old wood, blue, blousey flowers growing in the dapples. He’d walked through the whispering trees with an often-present dream companion, and then a huge presence had blown through the canopy, sudden as a storm cloud. Ronan, bereft with terror and the certainty that this alien force wanted him, only him, had snatched at anything he could before being ripped aloft.
When he’d woken, he’d clutched a pulpy handful of blue flowers of a sort no one had seen before. Ronan tried, now, to explain them to Gansey, the wrongness of the stamen, the furriness of the petals. The impossibility of them.
Even to Gansey, he couldn’t admit the joy and terror of the moment. The heart-pounding thought: I’m just like my father.
As Ronan spoke, Gansey’s eyes were half-closed, turned toward the night. His thoughtless expression was one of wonder or of pain; with Gansey, they were so often the same thing.
“That was an accident,” Gansey reasoned. He capped the glue. “Now you can do it on purpose?”
Ronan couldn’t decide if he should exaggerate his prowess or emphasize the difficulty of the task. “I can sometimes control what I bring, but I can’t choose what I dream about.”
“Tell me what it’s like.” Gansey stretched to get a mint leaf from his pocket. He put it on his tongue and spoke around it. “Walk me through it. What happens?”
From the vicinity of the wastebasket, there was a satisfying tearing sound as a small raven ripped a large envelope lengthwise.
“First,” Ronan replied, “I get a beer.”
Gansey shot him a withering look.
The truth was that Ronan didn’t understand the process very well himself. He knew it had something to do with how he fell asleep. The dreams were more pliable when he drank. Less like taut anxiety and more like taffy, susceptible to careful manipulation until, all at once, they broke.
He was about to say this, but instead, what came out of his mouth was: “They’re mostly in Latin.”
“Beg pardon?”
“They always have been. I just didn’t know it was Latin until I got older.”
“Ronan, there’s no reason for that,” Gansey said sternly, as if Ronan had hurled a toy on the floor.
“No shit, Sherlock. But there it is.”
“Is it your — your thoughts that are in Latin? Or the dialogue? Do other people speak Latin in them? Like, am I in your dreams?”
“Oh, yes, baby.” It amused Ronan to say this, a lot. He laughed enough that Chainsaw abandoned her paper shredding to verify that he wasn’t dying. Ronan sometimes dreamt of Adam, too, the latter boy sullen and elegant and fluently disdainful of dream-Ronan’s clumsy attempts to communicate.
Gansey pressed on. “And I speak Latin?”
“Dude, you speak Latin in real life. That’s not a good comparison. Yeah, fine, if you’re there. But usually, it’s strangers. Or the signs — the signs are in Latin. And the trees speak it.”
“Like in Cabeswater.”
Yes, like in Cabeswater. In familiar, familiar Cabeswater, although Ronan surely hadn’t been there before this spring. Still, arriving there for the first time had felt like a dream he’d forgotten.
“Coincidence,” Gansey said, because it wasn’t, and because it had to be said. “And when you want something?”
“If I want something, I have to be, like, aware enough to know that I want it. Almost awake. And I have to really want it. And then I have to hold it.” Ronan was about to use the example of the Camaro keys, but thought better of it. “I have to hold it not as a dream, but like it’s real.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can’t pretend to hold it. I have to really hold it.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Neither did Ronan, but he didn’t know how to say it any better. For a moment he was quiet, thinking, no sound but Chainsaw returning to the floor to pick at the corpse of the envelope.
“Look, it’s like a handshake,” he said finally. “You know when some guy goes in for the shake, and you’ve never met him before, and he puts it out there, and you just know in that moment right before the shake if it’s going to be sweaty or not? It’s like that.”
“So what you’re saying is you can’t explain it.”
“I did explain it.”
“No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.”
“Idid explain it,” Ronan insisted, so ferociously that Chainsaw flapped, certain she was in trouble. “It’s a nightmare, man — it’s when you dream of getting bit and when you wake up your arm hurts. It’s that.”
“Oh,” said Gansey. “Does it hurt?”
Sometimes, when he took something out of a dream, it was such a senseless rush that it left the real world pale and unsaturated for hours after. Sometimes he couldn’t move his hands. Sometimes Gansey found him and thought he was drunk. Sometimes, he really was drunk.
“Does that mean yes? What is this thing, anyway?” Gansey had picked up the wooden box. When he turned one of the wheels, one of the buttons on the other side depressed.
“A puzzle box.”
“What does that mean?”
“Fuck if I know. That’s just what it was called in the dream.”
Gansey eyed Ronan over the top of his wireframes. “Don’t use that voice on me. You have no idea whatsoever?”
“I think it’s supposed to translate things. That’s what it did in the dream.”
Up close, the carvings were letters and words. The buttons were so small and the letters so precise that it was impossible to see how it could’ve been made. Also impossible was how the wheels of characters could have been fixed into the box without there being any seams in the rainbow-striped grain of the wood.
“Latin on that side,” Gansey observed. He turned it. “Greek here. What’s that — Sanskrit, I think. Is this Coptic?”