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Jay slowly pulled back the blanket, revealing the curled-up form of the small sand-colored tabby cat, who blinked up at him sleepily, then began to purr.

“Hey,” he said weakly. “Hi.”

Well, maybe this wasn’t so weird. Hannah had told him that dreamers could bring things out of dreams—or had she? Either way, either he’d figured out how to, or the cat had decided to come with him through its own accord. He wasn’t sure how that would work either, but… well, cats already had a reputation for weirdness, even back when he hadn’t thought any of this stuff was real.

Finding out which it was might take some experimentation, he thought wryly.

“All right,” he said aloud, sitting up and pulling the cat into his lap, putting it on its back. “Let’s take a look at you.”

It was definitely the exact same cat, down to the injured paw, although, now that it had been cleaned, the wound was looking a lot better. He contemplated if he could bandage it, but he wasn’t confident he could wrap the paw in a useful way, and the bleeding had seemed to have stopped again.

“I guess I own a cat now?” he asked it. It purred louder, making biscuits in the air, and he scrubbed fingers through his own currently kind of grungy hair. “Okay. Well. I guess as soon as I’m up and about I have to get some things for you.” This cat was going to need food, litter… he wasn’t even sure what else. A vet appointment, certainly.

That at least he could do now. He grabbed his laptop, putting it beside himself and googling for a local vet. He found one that opened at eight-thirty, and rolled around for an hour just resting, eating leftovers for breakfast, writing out the details of the two dreams journeys he’d been on so he wouldn’t forget about them, and otherwise catching up on his real online life while waiting for it to open, then gave it a call.

“Kingsport Central Veterinary.”

“Yeah, hi,” he said, as always a little awkward over phone conversations. “I found a stray cat and I, uh, was thinking I wanted to keep it, so I wanted to make sure it had all its shots and so on. Can I make an appointment?”

“Let me see—It looks like we have an opening at 11:30. Will that do?”

“I think so. Thanks.” Honestly, three hours out wasn’t bad. The idea of doing something as mundane, if unexpected, as picking up something like cat supplies seemed like such a relief that he could cry.

He dressed properly, leaving the cat snoozing in his bed, stretched out with its eyes squinched shut in pleasure and curling up, and petted it lightly before he headed out. “Stay here for now,” he said. “I gotta get you some things so this is your home too.”

It “mrp”ed sleepily, and he hesitated a moment on whether or not to shut it in his room—not fancying the risk that it’d use his blankets as a litter box rather than somewhere else in this hoarder’s nightmare of a house—but he also didn’t want to risk it waking up to find him gone and panicking, maybe hiding somewhere he wouldn’t be able to find it. He could walk around with it later and make sure it was exploring in nonthreatening circumstances.

He shut the door, then headed out to the car, driving down into town where he vaguely recalled seeing a pet store earlier. Twenty minutes later, he was out again with a litter box, cat food, treats, a carrier, a cat bed, a running water dish, a food bowl, a bunch of toys, and the amused congratulations of the pet store employee who’d been helping him out.

While he was in the plaza with the vet, he stopped by a pharmacy to get some first aid supplies in case the cat’s wound opened up—or in case he hurt himself on something old and gross in the house, or maybe got bit by some horrible dream monstrosity—and also grabbed himself some quick food supplies from the pharmacy as well. A box of eggo waffles, some cans of soup, bread and jam, and he was ready to head back again.

Back home, he put the waffles on—since he’d had leftovers for breakfast, he might as well have breakfast for lunch—filled the litter box, and placed it in the laundry room so it would be somewhat out of the way. He put the food and water in the kitchen at the end of the counter, then headed back upstairs.

The cat was awake when he got there, pawing at the blankets; it had managed to peel up the corner of the fitted sheet. Jay winced, fully expecting the accident he’d feared, and came over to check—but there wasn’t anything, and the cat seemed less like it was trying to cover something and more like it was trying to get into the mattress.

Aw, shit. These mattresses had been here for a while; his heart sank. Was there a mouse? He hadn’t heard any mice running around, no rats in the walls, but that didn’t mean anything. “Uh, buddy, what’re you after?” He picked up the cat and put it on the floor to check the mattress himself.

The cat sighed at that, then rose on its back feet, shoving its head at the line between mattress and box spring as if trying to squish itself in there. Jay steeled himself for whatever horrible thing he was about to see, whether rodent nest or insect pile, and pushed the top mattress back to check the condition of the box spring.

It was fine, in perfectly good condition, clean—relatively new at the time she’d left, apparently—and, lying on the box spring, right under where his head would have been laying on the mattress and pillow above, was a palm-sized round disk, the twisted pentagram with the flaming eye on it, with a key attached to the bottom of the disc.

“Uh,” Jay said weakly. The cat, having lost interest in the mattress now that he’d pushed it back, wound around his ankles.

So Aunt Grace slept with a Sign under her mattress. Now, or always? If she’d owned all these Signs, then it made sense she’d have them around the apartment. On the other hand, if she’d used them to go through the door with her physical body, wouldn’t they have gone with her? He wondered if there was even a way to know if it had been here because she’d put it here, or if it had appeared because of something he’d done—because of dreaming? Meeting Keziah?

Then again, there was the reed symbol he’d found in the attic, and Ashesh had implied he knew it would be there. Would meeting Camden have made it appear? Should he keep it away from Camden, if so?

Or had it already been there? If it had been, the other two would be too. And if it wasn’t, the other two would appear when he did something to cause it—as Louis had indicated could happen with the Yellow Sign.

Or maybe, he thought glumly, it was both. There were Signs here, and more could appear. Maybe he’d end up swimming in Signs. Fucking drowning in Signs.

But that was a problem for a future Jay, he decided firmly. If he thought of a good place to look for existing Signs, he’d go looking. Otherwise, he could look toward triggering them and see if that worked. Either way, he needed ideas on where to look, or how to trigger it, and he hadn’t thought of either yet. Maybe later today he’d ask Ashesh, if he couldn’t come up with his own ideas—he probably should talk to him sooner or later anyway, since he’d learned more since they’d talked the day before. But, Jay thought glumly, he didn’t really want to owe Ashesh. If he were going to talk to him, he had better think through what exactly he wanted to ask, and what, at most, he was willing to offer up.

But for now? He had a new cat to take care of. He looked at it; it had stopped winding around his ankles and was trotting around the room with curiosity. “You seem kind of comfortable with being indoors. Did you belong to someone in Ulthar?”

The cat, obviously, didn’t answer, but began exploring the hall outside with no sign of trepidation. It occurred to Jay that he might have stolen someone’s cat, but… well, he decided, it seemed more likely it was a stray. For all that it was soft, and had clearly been fed, there had been a lot of cats wandering the banks where he was found, and from how the barkeeper had talked, people probably put out food and water for the strays. If it was familiar with the indoors, again, people might just allow them into stores and so on. Certainly the barkeeper hadn’t minded him bringing it in.

So yeah, hopefully that. Anyway, he hadn’t chosen to steal it, which had to count for something.

The cat had discovered the stairs and was limping down them, so Jay hastened to catch up. “Let me show you your stuff,” he said, scooping it up to carry it the rest of the way down to the basement, ignoring the ominous door to take it into the laundry room. “Here’s your litter box. So you can, uh, use the bathroom.” Even if it could understand him, did it know what a bathroom was? “You know, relieve yourself, then bury it.”

He put the cat down in case it needed to use it; it went over, sniffed at it, looked up at Jay with an expression like Yeah, I know, and turned to explore the rest of the laundry room.

“Ok, you can look around later, but I want you to know where your food is too.” Jay carried it back upstairs, to the kitchen, and put it down in front of its food dish.

That it liked. Jay’s waffles had popped out at this point, so he ate them at the same time, enjoying the hunched form of the cat and the loud crunchy way it chewed, finding a moment of peace in that simple thing.

He still had a short time left before he had to go to the vet, so now that he was assured the cat was perfectly comfortable here and unlikely to hide, he left the cat to it and headed back upstairs to Grace’s office—or so he thought; moments later, he heard a meow and the cat followed him, trotting after.

“Hey, clingy thing,” he said fondly. He let the cat in with him and watched it explore for a few moments, then popped back out to grab his laptop to take with him into the office, set it up next to Grace’s computer, and powered her machine back on, getting to work.

Recovery was, he quickly saw, a failure. None of the basics worked—the USB he’d confirmed he’d filled the night before was blank, the files on her drive weren’t recovering through any of the standard means, and even specialized recovery utilities got nothing. He’d suspected as much, but he didn’t like it; it was worth continuing to try, he decided, at least later.

He still had her paper files to look at, but not enough time to do so before the vet, so he locked the new Sign in the desk with the other one, then scooped up the cat from where it was sitting in the windowsill watching outside and brought it to its carrier.

“Mow? MOW? MOW??” The cat’s wails started at once as Jay attempted to put it in. It dug its paws into the sides—even the injured paw—to try to keep itself from being put in, and thrashed around. Betrayal radiated off it.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Jay told it finally, sweating, slightly scratched, and disheveled. “I’m not trying to lock you up. I just need to use this to take you to the vet. A doctor for cats. It might not be a fun experience but it’s so I can make sure you stay healthy and get your foot all fixed up! We’ll come right back after and I’ll let you out, I promise.”

The cat glared at him again, but something about his tone must have convinced it, because it finally slunk in on its own, its tail lashing.

“Good kitty,” Jay told it, and shut up the carrier, picking it up and taking it out to the car.

As he shut the door, he paused, frowning up at the sky. Something about it didn’t look quite right. The cloud shapes seemed wrong somehow, making him anxious. Nerves, he thought. Just his dream carrying through into the daytime. Still, he strained his eyes, staring up, watching the clouds shift and move like they were trying to get closer.

His phone warned him that he needed to leave now to get to the vet on time, and he tore his gaze away, getting into the car himself. It was probably nothing.

The cat stayed quiet through the car trip, occasionally bumping around in the carrier as it turned itself around in there, and also was quiet—definitely sulking, though—as he carried it in.

“Name?” the receptionist asked.

“Jae-Hyun Park.”

“And your cat’s name?”

Right, shit, it needed a name. Naming a dream cat felt like a big commitment, but he had to give something to the vet—even if he changed what he called it later. “Ulthar,” he blurted out, when nothing else came immediately to mind.

“Arthur?”

He repeated it, and she typed into her computer. Not long after that, the cat was seen—it was equally affectionate with the vet, and seemed to be over its sulk once it realized it got to be talked to and petted. Jay learned that the cat was male, relatively healthy but underweight, and was unchipped. The cat got its shots, a chip, and antibiotic ointment, along with a lot of praise for being a Good Boy.

And then he was back to the car under the unnerving sky, ready to head back to his new home with his new cat.

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Jay held his breath until he was sure that he wasn’t going to hyperventilate. Don’t panic, he told himself. He’d never been to the Dreamlands before, so maybe ‘monstrosities in the stars trying to get in’ was normal here. Maybe it had always been this way.

And besides, he’d wanted to come to a safe place, so surely this was safe.

Even as he thought it, though, he found himself doubting. Sure, if he was a waking-worlder with the same talent as Aunt Grace, he might be able to have power in his dreams here, but it sounded like plenty of people practiced for years before they could change anything. Places here were real, and most of them pre-existed—four continents, places that Aunt Grace mentioned like she’d just passed through them, not made them, a library that already had rules. People had been talking like creating something was possible but a huge achievement, and if that was true, then the idea that he, himself, could create some kind of barrier that could keep out whatever that was—

But what could would panicking do? He had to believe that if he’d wanted somewhere safe, and he’d happened to come here, it was safe.

He wrenched his gaze away from the sky and found himself staring at the injured cat again, instead. “Hey there,” he said, his voice a little croaky with stress.

“Mrrp,” the cat said, and rubbed its cheek against Jay’s fingers, lips slightly parted and whiskers spread, a toothy smile.

“You’re pretty tame, huh.” He slowly moved his hand to rub the cat’s ears, moving with deliberation so the cat could pull away or swat him if it wanted, but it just leaned up, starting a rumble. “Can I take a look at that paw? See if there’s anything I can do?”

The cat rumbled louder, then flopped onto its side. He petted that side too, carefully, then slid a hand down the cat’s leg to lift it so he could examine it. The cat’s side twitched and its tail thumped, but it otherwise didn’t protest the treatment.

The underside of its paw showed a nasty gash, clearly recent, though not still bleeding. Blood caked the fur between its toes, and Jay winced as he looked at that. “Oh, poor thing,” he muttered, tone sympathetic.

“Mreeeep!” the cat agreed, tail thumping again.

Jay carefully adjusted his grip on the cat, trying to pick it up. Its foot needed cleaning, and walking around on it was clearly doing it no good—he’d have to see if there was a place nearby that could help.

The cat seemed to hesitate, torn between jumping down from Jay’s arms and accepting this, and after a moment, it leaned up against him, putting its cheek against his shoulder and purring.

Shit, it’s cute. Horrible monstrosities in the sky or not, it did make him feel a little more secure.

He settled the cat in his arms as he rose again, looking around. For a while, he just walked, unwilling to knock on a house door after dark even if there were lanterns there, looking for a place that might be open. Finally, he found a place with a sign outside reading The Cat in His Cups, with a pub-style window, all criss-cross grating. Fiddle music could be heard from the inside, and the place looked well-lit, so he opened the door.

There was in fact a fiddler sitting up in stage, and several people at their tables, having dinner or drink, but the place was largely abandoned. Some of the customers glanced up at him with worried faces as he entered, then away, uninterested or unwilling to get involved.

That was fine. He carried the cat up to the bar, holding it carefully, as the barman—a handsome black man with a puff ponytail—came over to greet him. “Can I help you—?”

“Sorry to bring a pet in,” Jay began. “But this guy seems to be hurt, and I was wondering if I could get a little water to help clean his foot with?”

The bartender’s brows rose. “Of course. Poor little thing. You… just found it like that, you didn’t do anything, right?”

“No, of course not,” Jay protested. “I saw it limping so… I figured I’d try to help.”

“Good on you, lad,” the bartender said. “It’s illegal to kill a cat here, and I shouldn’t think anyone would look kindly on you for hurting one. But if you’re helping him out, you’ll surely earn some favor.” He poured a glass of water from a pitcher and grabbed a clean towel from under the bar, offering both over.

Jay nodded his thanks. “Can I put it on the bar while I get its foot clean?”

“Sure, don’t mind that you do, as long as you keep your grip on it,” the bartender said, easily. “Can I get you anything yourself?”

Carefully depositing the cat on the bar, Jay shook his head. “I don’t… have any local currency,” he said. “I’m, um, new? New to dream-walking.”

The bartender seemed more surprised at that. “A waking-worlder whose talent clicked, huh? Well, congratulations. Most of us are the descendants of dreamers ourselves; welcome to Ulthar.”

“Ulthar,” Jay repeated. “Is that the city or the country or—”

“Just this town, lad,” the bartender said, watching as the cat obediently let Jay tilt it onto its side. “We’re in the West continent, near the river Skai. The West continent is the most settled one, so if you find yourself travelling to a city, you’ll usually, though not certainly, be around here. Or are you here to stay?”

Jay shook his head. He dabbed the cloth into the water, then carefully pressed it to the cat’s foot. The cat let out a whine, but spread its toes, tail thumping as it gazed mournfully up at him. “I’m just… learning more,” he said. “I’m trying to get better at dreaming and… help others, I suppose.” Camden came to mind again. “I know someone who’s under some sort of sea curse?”

“Don’t know anything about that here,” the bartender said. “We live a quiet, safe life here in Ulthar. A port town might have more information?”

Nodding, Jay sighed. “Speaking of port towns,” he said, “I don’t suppose you have a map?”

“I suppose I could help you with one of those,” the bartender said. “Since you’re here being so kind to that poor creature.”

“It’s like it understands that I’m trying to help,” Jay said, watching the way the cat allowed him to clean its wound, even though it was trembling.

“Aye, probably,” the barkeeper agreed. “They’re smart beasts. Good pets. Almost everyone has one.”

Jay smiled a little. “I don’t have one myself,” he said. “My old place didn’t allow them on the lease. But I like them.”

“Figure the little beastie can tell,” the bartender said fondly. “One moment.”

He headed into a back room, and Jay finished cleaning up around the wound. Removing the dirt and old blood got it bleeding again, a bit sluggishly, and he pressed the cloth to the cat’s foot to try to stem it, gently petting its head and earning a nuzzling into his palm in return.

“Here you go,” the barkeep said, returning and unrolling a scroll. “Study the map as much as you want, though I’ll need it back.”

Jay pulled the cat back into his arms, so he could hold the cloth to its foot and look at the same time. As he examined it, his heart sank a little.

The world of the Dreamlands was big and, more to the point, not clearly divided into areas that would narrow down where Grace had gone—if it was even here, and not something else her dreaming had permitted her. The continents made a big jagged loop around a middle ocean, which was divided into smaller seas in a z-shape. And a full three of the continents had deserts on them—all but the North.

He resigned himself to get what information he could, at least. “Are any of these cities made of black spires?”

“Black spires?” The barkeeper had to think about it, and the result he came up with was dubious at best. “Maybe Dylath-Leen? I’d call it more obelisks myself.”

It might be close enough to count, but he wasn’t sure. Still, there was one more name he’d been told, which didn’t seem to be on this map. “I’m also looking to find where the Library of Celaeno is.”  

The bartender seemed taken aback at that. “Celaeno? That’s a star.”

“What?”

“It’s not in the Dreamlands,” the bartender said, drumming his fingers on the bar. “I mean, it’s connected to it. Those Great Old Ones all have portals here and there, especially through the dreams of men, so the Dreamlands have exits into their worlds as they do into the waking world. The Stalker Among the Stars makes frequent use of the portals here, so we know of their existence, though I don’t know of any humans who’ve made use of them.”

Jay winced a little. “Who? Are they…” he glanced out the window at the awful sky.

The barkeeper’s expression darkened. “Not those,” he said. “Those started to show up some years ago. More and more, they’ve been gathering. So far, they haven’t broken through, so there’s only so much worrying, you know? Someone will deal with it.”

Actually, that seemed plenty worrying. “How long ago?”

“Mm. Just under a decade by a waking-worlder’s time?” the barkeeper wagered. “Time passes differently when you’re here physically. It’s slower, so I’m just guessing off what I saw.”

That wasn’t great.”…If the Stalker Among the Stars isn’t one of those, what is it?”

“You know. The Crawling Chaos.” He lowered his voice. “Nyarlathotep. He fancies himself a protector of the Dreamlands, as little respect as he shows for it. So if you’re looking for the Library of Celaeno, you’ll need to look outside your world and mine. At best, the Dreamlands is a stepping stone to it, and it is a stepping stone to the Dreamlands—among other realms.”

Jay was silent, thinking back to the Library—and the painting he’d found himself in front of when he’d gone there. A city full of black domes and spires.

“I see,” he said, chilled. “That’s not great.”

“Why’s that, lad?”

Jay opened his mouth to answer, but his voice seemed to be coming from far away, hard to pull out. For a moment, he felt dizzy, scared—had they broken through? Was this the end?—and tried to focus on the texture of the cat in his arms, the pressure on its paw, as if that would save him from whatever was happening.

It did not; he was waking up.

***

He woke up dry-mouthed in Aunt Grace’s—his—room, shaking as the first light of dawn was beginning to show through the window, the dissolution of that dream sitting uneasy in him, nearly a shock. Trying to steady himself, he curled on his side, tightening his arms around the bundle of blankets he was clinging onto.

“Mrew,” it said, protesting.

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No Signs, Jay decided. If he wanted to establish himself as a neutral figure, he had to start out that way. He might need to use a Sign to get information from the Library sooner or later, but that could wait until he had at least two of them.

So he’d just sleep a normal sleep, and try to dream something else.

But that could wait. He still had a little time before bed. Thus decided, he put the treasure chest containing the awful figurine in a desk drawer and re-locked it, then turned back to Grace’s computer, sorting the files by date.

They went up to shortly before she’d disappeared—he couldn’t remember the exact date, but knew it had been in August of 2010, so that several of them were dated in July was suspicious. It looked as though most of the files were quite old, and they got rarer and rarer as time went on in the 2010s.

He started with the latest one, opening it up to find only a shopping list. It looked normal—incredibly normal, to the point that he had to wonder why she’d be writing it down in a saved file at all. Eggs, milk, sugar, oatmeal, coffee.

Maybe a decoy file of some kind? Or maybe, he reminded himself, she just held onto everything.

The next file back also wasn’t terribly useful—just a doctor’s appointment reminder, but he kept going back, until—

He says that I completed my Quest.

Even writing it down, I can’t believe it. I’ve been working on this for fifteen years, to be able to earn a place to craft into my image. It was nearly impossible. I feel worn to the bone in the doing of it.

It feels like a lie. I dropped it. Where did it get dropped? He says it doesn’t matter—that I did what he asked of me, and so the deal is made. That as long as I had stolen it, he didn’t ask for more. He says he will take care of it.

My time for this world is short. I feel it in my heart, my lungs, my exhausted body. If I wait too long, I won’t be able to go there at all. I’ll simply die.

But I’ll wait a little longer. I’ll retrace my steps to see if I can find it. As I fled, I saw:

Sea

Sand

The black-spired city

Library. Stopped here.

Mark them off as I go. Hopefully, it’s not somewhere in between.

So it seemed she used these files for everything. Shopping lists, doctor appointments, and personal diary. On the one hand, that meant if Jay kept looking, he might find more. On the other hand…

He didn’t much like what he’d already seen.

Jay rubbed his eyes, rereading the note. From what he could determine, this mysterious ‘he’ gave Grace a quest to complete in order to earn… an area of the Dreamlands to use for her own? A quest to steal something. And she succeeded, but lost the item.

It was clear she’d meant to print and check this, but he’d never found a printed version. Only the little handwritten slips of paper. They hadn’t mentioned a city, but that didn’t mean anything; as far as he knew, that might have been the only place she’d checked already.

He frowned faintly, checking the trash, but it had been emptied, just as with the downstairs garbage. No further leads there.

Well, he didn’t have much time before bed, but there was a quick way to find more: he started a search on the file explorer for ‘dream’, setting it to search within files.

And the computer crashed.

Jay swore aloud at that, gripping the edge of the desk, almost glaring a hole in the monitor as it rebooted. It came back up properly, and he reopened the file explorer.

All the file names had been replaced with hash garbage.

“What? Fuck—!” He double-clicked a file anyway, only to find it completely corrupted, a jumble of indecipherable letters and numbers. Another, same result. Another, another—

He sank back in the seat, frowning at it. All right, there were a number of things that could be done to deal with a corrupted file—backing it up to prevent further corruption, confirming it on other computers, CHKDSK, Open and Recover, a recovery program, etc. But with the huge number of files, and no confirmation of which ones were useful, it was going to be a slog, and given the subject matter and the fact the filenames had changed, he strongly suspected that this was less incidental corruption and more something… sinister.

Still, he backed up the corrupted files to a USB stick. Attempts to fix them could wait until tomorrow.

As they transferred, he got up from the desk and paced the room, scanning the book titles for anything on the Dreamlands. Other than a small collection of dream interpretation dictionaries—well, what would be a rather large collection of them for anyone but Aunt Grace—there wasn’t anything even related to dreaming, based on the titles.

Jay pulled a few of those dream dictionaries down and flipped through them, looking for any handwritten notes or annotations, but finding nothing there. “Useless,” he muttered to himself, then drew a deep breath, putting the books back rather than flinging them to the ground.

He was getting himself worked up, and he needed to calm down so he could sleep.

It looked as though the files had finally finished transferring—her machine wasn’t exactly young, and he was only glad that she mostly seemed to have documents, not videos or anything else that would chug along indefinitely. He unplugged the USB, then shut her computer down.

As he turned again, he looked out the window and caught sight of the bathroom light on in Louis’s house. A shape was moving around there, hard to see with the trees and back-lighting, and he lifted a hand to wave. But Louis must have been facing away, making a gesture like he was shrugging out of a bath robe, the color of his shape turning from a dark maroon to the pale whiteness of his skin.

It was too far for Jay to make out details, but he averted his eyes anyway until Louis abruptly left, sinking out of sight from the window.

“Better watch myself or I’m gonna have entirely the wrong kind of dreams tonight,” he muttered to himself, and felt a little better for it.

He put the USB on the desk, and turned the office light out, heading back to the bedroom. Stripping Grace’s sheets, he traded them out for his own bedding, remaking the bed so that it at least smelled and felt like his again.

And then he got changed and climbed into bed, curling up in there, feeling very alone, and wishing that dreaming didn’t feel kind of like making a commitment.

Closing his eyes, he rubbed his fingertips against the familiar feeling of his bed’s quilt, and tried to focus on something to dream about. The areas that Grace wrote about came to mind; he wished that he’d asked Hannah more about the four continents, because the locations Grace had listed couldn’t be entire continents by their nature, and he didn’t know where they’d be, assuming that anything in the Dreamlands matched up to a physical location. He’d seen the Library already and it certainly wasn’t a land mass, sand could be anywhere, a city was just a city, and sea was, by nature, around continents, not part of them.

Sea… it made him think about Camden. He didn’t want to dream of the sea itself, not and risk drowning—or cursing himself—before he even had the basics of this dream travel down, but he did want to see if the dreams could give him any insight into Camden. Not tonight, he decided reluctantly. Tonight was about making his own way, learning his own power. Maybe tomorrow, if he used the Sign then.

He wanted a place he could use for himself in the coming days, he thought sleepily. It sounded like being able to create your own home took a lot, judging from Grace’s note—fifteen years, a quest, leaving this world—but somewhere safe, somewhere quiet…

***

Jay woke up to find himself sitting on the bank of a low river, the waters running through it deep and loud. It cut through the center of a city of cobblestone roads and narrow stone cottages, many of them with thatched roofs. A bridge to the rest of the city was just a little further ahead. It was night, but lanterns were hanging outside many buildings, their windows lit from within, and more lanterns lined the streets and bridge.

Several cats scattered from where they were sniffing around him as he sat up; one, a sand-colored tabby cat, went only a little distance away, limping on one paw, and he offered it his hand, letting it lean forward to cautiously sniff him again.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. This didn’t seem so bad.

And then he looked up and saw the massive shapes pushing against the sky, clawing against the stars, pawing at the atmosphere as if it were a window holding them back.

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I have to be cautious about this.

Jay thought it reluctantly, but he did think it. Yes, Louis was attractive, mask and all, and under normal circumstances, going out for a dinner date—and maybe more—with a cute boy sounded great. They’d only met that morning, but they’d hit it off pretty well, and… well, why not?

But under the circumstances, Jay wasn’t sure he could take things at face value (as it were). Without spending more time getting to know Louis, he had no way of knowing his intentions. Was it even possible to separate Louis from the fact that he was the bearer of the Pallid Mask, the messenger of the King in Yellow? That, before they’d even met, Louis had left him a message about the Yellow Sign?

Maybe it would be with time. For now, though, Louis only knew Jay just as well as Jay knew Louis, and he wasn’t sure if Louis would be separating him from that, either.

Really, he just needed more time to gauge Louis. Who he was, what he wanted.

“I can’t tonight,” Jay said, and started the car up. He didn’t have to fake his disappointment. “I wish I could—I’d really like to spend the evening with you, but today’s been crazy and I’m just… exhausted.”

“Ah.” Louis rested his hands on his legs, gazing straight ahead through the windshield. “Of course. I understand.”

“I really mean it,” Jay stressed. He reached over and gently bumped Louis’s shoulder with a fist. “Under other circumstances, I’d say yes without a thought. But I need rest, and I’ve got a lot I’ve still got to do at the house tonight, and… I mean, I’m a little preoccupied with the whole ‘end of the world’ thing. It’s not very… conducive to a good date.”

Louis turned his head slowly, eyes a bit wide through his mask. “Excuse me?”

“Did you… not know? Did your, uh, King not say? The Crawling Chaos said that my world was going to end,” Jay said. It was still bizarre to hear coming out of his own mouth. “And that I had to hurry. So… yeah.”

For a long few moments, Louis didn’t respond. And then he sighed, tilting his head back against the rest. “Sometimes I think our world is on the edge of ending at any time,” he said. “No, it’s of no concern to my King. He watches from afar, but engaging is not… ever a concern. If the world is a stage, he is attending the play.”

“Sounds rough.”

“It’s not so bad,” Louis said absently. “In its own way, it’s comforting to think that whatever we live through, it’s been witnessed by someone. Even if the world ends, it will be witnessed, and remembered.”

Jay made a non-committal noise. “Is that how you feel about it? Like… if the world ends, that’s fine?”

Louis didn’t seem to know how to answer. He shifted, gazing out the passenger window instead. He was silent long enough that Jay had almost given up on getting a response before Louis abruptly said, “I don’t want it to happen. If there were something I could do to stop it, I would. But this is the first I’ve heard of it, and I haven’t… processed it?”

That last was tentative. Like he was guessing at his own reaction, trying to understand it.

“It’s a lot to take in,” Jay admitted. “I’m way too calm about it myself. Just… oh, sure, it’s ending? Guess I’ll try to stop that?”

“Right,” Louis said, with a little more surety. “You had to walk out this morning over lesser things. Please understand.”

“I do,” Jay said. “…Sorry I had to surprise you with it.”

“As rejections go, it’s a very understandable one,” Louis said, a bit of a smile in his voice again.

They’d reached the thrift shop, so Jay hopped out to drop things off there. When he got back, Louis had stepped out of the car. “I think,” Louis said, “I need to think about things myself. I’ll head back on my own.”

“Are you sure? It’s not exactly a long walk, but it’s getting dark…”

“Don’t worry about me,” Louis said, definitely smiling now. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”

Jay laughed, relaxing a little again. “Guess you couldn’t be,” he agreed. “I’ll talk to you later, then. Promise.”

“See you then,” Louis agreed.

Jay watched that pale mask in the rear-view mirror until he had to round the corner, then focused on the road ahead instead. Wouldn’t be any good to the world if he got into an accident, after all.

When he got home, he ordered food again, and killed some time watching Youtube videos until it arrived, trying to keep Camden’s suggestion in mind to space things out with some normalcy. But once he’d eaten, he dug out the keys that Ashesh had given him, and held them up again.

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to do this after dark, but he didn’t think he could sleep if he put it off until tomorrow anyway—having them, and needing to know where they went, would probably get him up in the middle of the night, and that was likely to be far worse for his sanity.

Ashesh had said that the keys would help Jay in the attic and the office, and he definitely didn’t want to hit up the attic too late at night, so he headed for that now, finding the stairs and heading up.

When Jay had been very young, he’d come up here to play hide and seek and all that. The attic had been designed like a full room, with a light switch, fully developed floors, and even a small window, pointed upward so it only showed the night sky, stars already starting to twinkle.

The memories would almost have been comforting if it weren’t for the looming shapes of stored objects, piles of dusty boxes, and even a dress-form that, on first glance, definitely got his heart pounding in the thought it might be a person.

“This might take a while,” he muttered to himself, flicking the light on and starting a first pass through the room to find something locked so he could unlock it.

The first pass wasn’t successful. He found things, certainly. Old jewelry boxes and cabinets, but either they were already unlocked, the keys didn’t fit, or they would sort of fit but wouldn’t turn.

It wasn’t until his second pass through, a little disheartened, that he took a closer look at the old, empty fish tank shoved into a back corner. It had clearly been cleaned, but had also clearly been redecorated after, pebbles put back in, along with the standard fake reeds, structures, and—as usual—a little treasure chest.

It was just about exactly the right size for the key. He didn’t exactly get his hopes up, not after so many failures, but he fished it out, finding it surprisingly heavy.

Jay inserted the key and turned it.

The lid popped open, revealing inside a disgusting-looking figurine made of jade. It was squat and twisted, a mess of toad-like features, fins, and tentacles, gazing up with bulging eyes. Even looking at it made him feel uncomfortable, as if he couldn’t take in all its details all at once.

His gaze dropped from its face to what was clutched in its hands: the sign of the Deep Ones, that jagged branch. It was held on a little plate that could clearly slide, and as he nudged it down with a thumbnail—careful not to touch the symbol itself—a little compartment opened, a key dropping from it to dangle from the figurine. Jay had a sinking feeling that it would fit into the door in the basement.

It seemed he’d found one of the Elder Signs.

Still, he hadn’t really touched the sign itself, hadn’t claimed it. Carefully, he put it back in the treasure chest and re-locked that, then put it in a pocket to carry with him. He could put it somewhere safe and decide if he wanted to make use of it later, when he knew more.

Feeling considerably more unnerved, he headed down from the attic and to the office. This one, he knew where the final key must go—and was correct. The drawers in the desk opened up at once with this key.

The bottom drawers—the file drawers—held a huge variety of folders full of article clippings and research notes for Aunt Grace’s old journalism work. The higher drawers had been emptied out, except for one piece of paper, which appeared to have the login and password for Aunt Grace’s computer.

Jay powered that up at once. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for—perhaps something on the desktop labelled “To Jay” or some other obviously helpful secret, but when the slow beast finally finished loading, he opened the file explorer only to find a huge list of documents—presumably journalistic also—all dumped into a single folder and labelled things like adsfjk_20040629.doc.

There was probably something useful in there, or in her physical folders—Ashesh had implied as much by indicating that Jay could make use of the key. But Jay didn’t think he’d be finding it tonight unless he got very lucky. He wasn’t sure if he should spend more time on it, or do something relaxing to try to clear his mind of the worst of the day before he slept.

He sighed, looking down at the scraps of ‘dream’ papers Grace had left on her desk, feeling the treasure chest heavy in his pocket. Sleeping meant dreaming, too—and he wasn’t sure how he should go about that. He needed to practice this talent, especially because he wanted to establish himself without leaning on any of the existing cults. But finding one of the Signs had almost thrown a wrench in that, since he knew he could use it if he wanted.

How should he spend what little was left of his evening?

And then, after, how should he try to dream? Should he use the key on the basement door, or keep the Sign of the Deep One with him while he slept in his bed—or should he leave it locked up and try to enter the Dreamlands on his own? He wasn’t sure if he should use the Sign now he had it, or wait until he had more Signs, wouldn’t be handing himself over to be influenced by one specific god.

And whether he used it or not, where should he try to go in his sleep? Should he return to the library, use one of the places Grace named, or try something different, try to make his own way along, and see what he could manage on his own?

Getting ready for bed had never seemed so intimidating.

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