The first thing that went wrong was the cloud lady.
Opal had not been to the bench in several days because Adam and Ronan had both been home and she didn’t want to waste any minutes when they were home. But then Adam went to I can’t believe he can’t just do the job himself fine I’ll be back and Ronan started working on the computer in a boring way so Opal went roaming.
It was the wrong time of day for the cloud lady, far too late, but Opal went there anyway, because she missed watching her. By the time she thrashed through the trees to the bench, the air was dim and the creek was all-black, no-white, and it sounded louder than it did during the day. The grass all looked gray and black and the moss also looked gray and black and the bench also looked gray and black. The only thing that was not gray and black was beside the bench on the ground. It was white and cloudy.
When Opal realized that it was the cloud lady, she cried out in the dream language before she could help herself. It was just that the image in front of her was so wrong that it felt like a nightmare.
But it was not a nightmare, it was the animal world.
Opal hesitated on the other side of the bank for several long minutes, waiting to see if the cloud lady would stop being a white blob beside the bench, reminding herself that she was a secret and had to remain a secret.
But the cloud lady remained a white blob. Opal stomped her hooves and then growled a little and finally leapt over the creek. She crept slowly to the cloud lady but she knew right away that she did not have to worry about being quiet. There was no animalness to the cloud lady anymore. There was only a little bit of a bad smell and a box of crackers collapsed beside her. Opal checked it for crackers, but they had all been eaten, though she didn’t know if the cloud lady had eaten them or squirrels had.
She touched the cloud lady’s hair, which she had always wanted to do, and then she touched the tubes going into her nose, and then she touched her cloud body. It was not as soft as it had looked from a distance. It was pretty solid. Pretty real.
Opal began to wail. She rocked back and forth beside the cloud lady’s body, and she clutched her own cap and pulled it down over her ears and eyes, and she let out the piercing, raucous shrieks Ronan had told her not to do now that she was outside of a dream. Adam had once said they were so loud that they could wake the dead, but they didn’t, not when put to the test. This was the animal world, and dead things couldn’t be living again here. It wasn’t like when Ronan was killed again and again in his dreams. The cloud lady wasn’t going to be reset and reappear on the bench again the next time Opal came.
Opal hated this small animal world and all its small, limiting rules.
She wailed and wailed until she heard noises in the woods, voices rising, other humans, still full of animalness. She retreated across the creek to her hiding place. She wanted to wait to see what would happen to the cloud lady’s body, but she knew it would be harder to slip away once the others were close. And it wasn’t like there were many options for what would follow. They might eat the cloud lady or they might take her away but they would not do the thing Opal wanted, which was to make the cloud lady an animal again.
So she slid back through the trees, crying and wailing in her own head, until she was back at the Barns. Fireflies winked by her as she waded through the grass, but she didn’t have the heart to catch any. Instead she stumbled right up to the back porch, and to her surprise, she found Ronan already there.
He hadn’t turned on the back porch light and so he was just another pillar holding up the roof until she got up close to him. The dreamstuff in him was unpleasantly fuzzing the same static it had been doing for weeks, and his face was cast in gray evening light and she didn’t like how he did not look exactly like himself, but she didn’t care enough to not walk right up to him and hug his leg.
Ronan let her cling to him for a minute, his hand on her head, and then he said in a low voice, “Opal, could you get Adam? He’s working on his car.”
When she didn’t move because Adam’s car was only just around the front of the house and so Ronan could just go there himself, he repeated himself in Latin. This was strangeness because he sounded like an old sort of himself, the sort of him that she would have spoken to in a dream, where there were things that might kill them both. But this was not a dream; it was the real chipped-paint back porch of the real farmhouse.
Adam was fetched. As he rounded the corner of the yard, he called out to Ronan, “Opal’s got a bee in her bonnet, or however you say it. She wouldn’t let it go. Did you actually send her?”
“Parrish,” Ronan said. “There’s—” He lifted his fingers to reveal that they were smeary with black, like black paint. No, not like black paint. Like the opposite of white paint.
“What—” said Adam.
Opal caught the noise of the stuff a second after she saw it. It was a sound that was not-a-sound, a sound that sucked in the precise sound of the ley line and canceled it out. It was nothingness and unmaking, and she remembered it from the nightmare of the fall before. It was the thing that had almost destroyed her and Ronan, a monster with no real name. Fear began to rocket up from her hooves to her cheeks, all of her going cold and shivery.
Adam asked, “Did you dream it?”
Ronan shook his head, and as he did, a thin dribble of that same black escaped from one of his nostrils.
It was coming out of him. The last time this had happened, it had come out of him and out of him and out of him while he twitched in a car, and it had come out of Opal while she huddled in the same car. It had been killing him, impossibly and terribly, like in a dream, only he had been awake. The unsound of it combined in Opal’s mind with the smell of the cloud lady’s body. This was too much, and it shut down every reasonable thought inside her.
Opal began to scream, high and squalling. Chainsaw flapped her wings and began to scream as well. Their voices mingled, inseparable and identical, and truth wailed out as well, that they were both dreamstuff no matter how animally they felt, they were both Ronan’s dreamstuff, and most of what made them different was only details, and most of what made them the same would die if Ronan died. This was horrifying and too big to think about as it had always been, and so she could not stop screaming.
Her scream and her fear were so loud that she could not seem to see at the same time, and so it was with confusion that she found herself outside alone. It was only after she retroactively considered the memory that she remembered Adam brusquely taking Ronan by the arm and shutting the door between her and them.