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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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Jay jerked his gaze back to Hannah from the door, almost distracted by the cold tension that had been between her and Louis. “Ah, that’s… by Mother, do you mean…?”

“I am a Child of Keziah,” Hannah said, with another sharp-toothed but, he thought, friendly smile. “So, you know. Mother.”

“Right, sorry if that was obtuse,” he said, smiling back. He decided to let go of whatever was going on between the two of them; the book had said that Keziah’s sign was invoked to oppose the other Elder Gods, so it made sense that Hannah would be a bit cool when major players in other cults showed up. Louis might have said some pretty reassuring things to Jay personally, but ultimately, this was really none of his business. “I haven’t received a lot of direct names of, uh, groups or anything.”

She laughed. “You can say cult; it’s totally true.” Her hands were working briskly, taking things out of the bin and sorting them into piles. “‘The Children of Keziah’, for me. If anyone else doesn’t give their association out, they’re just trying to be sketchy and mysterious. I mean, I get it, this whole thing sort of loans itself to sketchy mysteriousness.”

“It super does,” he said, groaning. He leaned back against the counter, watching her work, her muscles sliding under her skin with a strangely unnatural smoothness. Like, if she were animated, she was at the wrong frame rate or something; he wasn’t even sure how else to think of it. Just that time wasn’t moving right for her body’s motions. “Honestly I didn’t know any of this before I came.”

“Oof. Bad Grace. I get it, though. You don’t put this thing on paper, you don’t mention it casually to outsiders. That’s a good way to have… hmm. Collateral damage.”

He almost asked what she meant—but he could guess, really. Camden had worried about attracting the wrong sort of attention, and had said that names could do that. Louis had said that, just by Jay’s reading even part of a book he happened to find, he might end up finding the Yellow Sign—and Louis had even been supernaturally alerted to the fact Jay had found the book. And something about his arrival must have caused Ashesh to show up in the house next door—the more Jay thought about it, the less he found himself able to believe that even a cultist would summon the Crawling Chaos to housesit.

“Yeah, no wonder Aunt Grace hadn’t done more than describe her dreams,” he said, wincing. “Even that might have been risky, now that I know what I know.”

Hannah glanced up, quirking a brow at him. “Well, you’ve adjusted fast,” she said. “Maybe she at least helped pave the way so you wouldn’t lose your mind over all this.”

Jay didn’t want to know how literally she meant it. “I’m doing my best,” he said. “Honestly, it’s not great. Like a scratching in my head and chest whenever I think about it too hard.”

“Poor thing,” she said, with no real concern.

“…Speaking of dreams, though,” he said. “If she said I might talk to you, I presume she, uh, told you about our discussion?”

She’d emptied the bin and was moving onto the larger pieces now, shifting them around with purpose. “I mean, ‘told me’ isn’t quite accurate, but yes.”

“She said she couldn’t give me any information until I found a Sign.”

“Nobody takes information away from the Library of Celaeno without having found some kind of Sign,” she agreed. “If you learn something forbidden there and don’t have a Sign, the information will end up taken from your mind. It’s not pleasant.”

He nodded, trying not to think too hard about that, that scratching feeling threatening to come back. Like anxiety, he thought, but somehow more so. “What sort of commitment is it, to have a Sign?”

She hmmed softly. “That depends. Ultimately, having a Sign—which may or may not be a physical marker—is a sort of protection. Like a ward or a sigil. But it’s a protection because it says that someone has some amount of claim on you. Someone can have a Sign as simply as, you know, they looked it up in a book, and wrote it out on paper, and are showing it around. You’ll attract attention, though, every time you use it for any purpose. They can feel that, they can know it. Or, someone could have a Sign because they’ve… made mistakes, and aren’t long for this world. A curse mark, the evil eye—none of those are literal, but that sort of thing.”

“I think I get it,” he said, though he wished he didn’t. “So I could write down a sign and wave it around but it gives them some kind of… in? Or I could acquire one ritually, but then I’ve engaged in a ritual and that also has a power…?”

“Right. Using a sign absolutely gives them influence on you,” she said lightly. “Rituals also give influence on you. Using one without a ritual also means they didn’t know about it in advance. I wouldn’t say either is safer, just different.”

“Great. Reassuring.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I don’t specialize in reassuring.”

Jay blurted out, “Did you know the world is at threat of ending?”

She paused in the middle of sliding a vase over to sit next to one of her piles. “Yes, I know,” she said. “But I’m not strong enough a dreamer to do anything about it.”

“I don’t know why,” Jay said, urgently. “Please, you can’t want it to happen?”

“I don’t want it, no,” she said. “I mean, not exactly. There’s some appeal to the idea, I can’t deny it. You know, ‘The apocalypse? That might as well happen.’ Mm, but ending like that…”

“Like what?” Jay asked, leaning in.

She blinked, then smiled, brushing a hand against his cheek, talons lightly brushing the skin of his throat. “I don’t exactly know,” she said. “All I’ve had is nightmares. Mother hasn’t said more.”

He flushed, swallowing. “So I need to ask directly?”

“From someone who’d know? Probably.” She let her hand drop, straightening. “Like  I said, I’m not a strong enough dreamer. That’s why I’m doing her business in this world.”

Jay nodded slowly. “What can a stronger dreamer do?”

“Oh, anything. Travel through the four continents of the Dreamlands with just their mind. Enter, despite the danger, with their body. Move into the cities that exist there. Become immortal. Create—” she sounded hungry for a moment. “They can create things. Items. Places… their own homes, their own palaces, their own cities. Maybe even new people. In dreams, you can find things you’ve long since lost, hope and inspiration, and recreate them for yourself. Of course, you can also die. Many things live in the Dreamlands.”

“But you can’t go…?” He knew he was asking something sensitive here, tried to pitch his voice gently.

Maybe she appreciated the empathy; her lips twitched, wry. “Most people can’t. Lots of children have the ability, but we lose it as we get older. But, even if she is the Dream Witch, Mother also is a mother of this world. There is plenty one can do for her here.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and visibly dropped the subject, smiling at him and pointing to one of her piles. “All right, this is junk. I won’t be able to sell it so I can’t take it. For the rest of it… What do you say to $125 for the lot, plus you give me a surprise the next time you bring a load of her things by?”

“A surprise?”

Hannah winked at him. “Look, there aren’t a lot of young, attractive, eligible men around here who I haven’t known my entire life, bring me a flower or a nice card or something, I don’t care, it’ll just perk my day up, versus sorting through other people’s trash all day, you know?”

He flushed harder, then laughed. “I can do that,” he agreed, feeling some tension in his chest loosen. “Okay. $125 and a surprise.”

She perked up at that, rising with a bounce. “Great! You get the rejects packed up and I’ll get the cash.”

He did, filling the bin up, then accepting the creased bills she handed him. “Thanks, Hannah,” he said. “I really appreciate… well, all of this.”

“See, that’s the spirit,” she said. “I’ll help you get this back to the car.”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you—”

She hefted the bin like it weighed nothing, quirking a brow at him. “Sorry, what?”

“No, nothing. Wow,” he added, and she let out a trill of laughter as she carried it out.

Louis was already back from his walk—if he’d even gone on one—and kept his gaze focused on Jay as the two of them came back out. Hannah helped Jay load the bin back up, then gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t go crazy,” she advised, then headed back inside.

When she’d finally done so, Louis seemed to relax a little. “A good meeting?”

Jay shrugged, a little awkward. “I think so,” he said. “She seemed nice.”

“Mm, sure.” Louis glanced in the back of the car. “Were those the things she wouldn’t take?”

“Yeah, not antique enough. Or valuable enough.” Jay tapped Louis’s arm gently, getting his attention back, and gave him an encouraging smile. It seemed, again, to surprise him. “Still up for helping me take them to the thrift store?”

Louis nodded, letting Jay open the passenger door for him. “…Yes. And after that?”

“After?” Jay slid into the driver’s seat.

“Do you want me to come back to your house? To help you with… well. Whatever you wish,” Louis said. His voice was mild, speaking absently, but his eyes were keen, focused on Jay. “With the house, this situation, or …otherwise.”

Jay was suddenly very aware of how close Louis was, could nearly feel the heat of his body. “Ah—”

“Or perhaps you’d like to come back to my house. Certainly, I could entertain you in style. Treat you to a relaxing dinner. Spend some time together,” Louis said. “If you wish to get out of your own house for a while.”

Hesitating, Jay ran his hands over the steering wheel, looking at them instead of at Louis. On the one hand, he really wanted to check out where those keys went—it might be important to check out where those keys went. And he wasn’t sure he could do that with Louis there—or could he? Would it really be such a bad idea?

And for the rest of it… it was impossible to deny that it had an appeal. But would he be able to enter the Dreamlands at someone else’s house, after… well, he didn’t want to assume, despite the implications.

He wasn’t even sure what he wanted.   

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All right, Jay decided. The most important thing here was the people. He was still pretty much a stranger, and had to rely on other people for information. So getting to meet Hannah today was important. He could look at the keys later tonight, and think about signs tomorrow—at least by doing this, it would mean he’d met all four of the people most closely associated with the four signs on the door, and meant he had access to as unbiased a view of all these things as possible, as a result. Anyway, his goal had been to be like Aunt Grace—to not associate himself with any one cult overly much, and he imagined not ignoring any of the four she clearly was involved with was part of that.

Besides, eldritch things aside, he’d always heard that small towns would notice if you’d snubbed someone. Even if most of the others had in some way come to him, if there were four main cults and he left someone out, it’d just be rude.

But he didn’t need to do it alone. Getting someone’s help would mean he could get things packed up, get down to the antique store, and still have time to socialize with someone—if only just the person he got to help him.

His thoughts immediately went to Louis. Louis was likely to still be home—given both the mysterious heir to a family fortune vibes he gave off and his mentioning that the work he did was from home; plus, he just plain didn’t seem like the sort of guy who got out a lot. Louis had already given him advice about what he could take down to be sold, and had offered to help with the house.

And given that he’d practically run out on the guy after the shocking news of cults, he could probably stand to make a second chance at a first impression. Weird to think that was just this morning.

Anyway, he’d already sent Camden, his other main option, away, and somehow he didn’t think he really wanted to ask Ashesh to help him carry stuff out to the car. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see Ashesh again—something about that wild, overwhelming presence called to him—but in this circumstance, it definitely didn’t seem like a good idea.  

Thus decided—and somewhat feeling the pressure of how little time he had to waste—he headed back over to Louis’s house.

Louis answered after the first knock, which was a little weird, but maybe he’d seen Jay coming. “…You came back.”

“Yeah,” Jay said. He ducked his head, a little embarrassed as he thought back. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Well. As you said, it wasn’t anything personal.” Louis folded his hands in front of himself. “You’ve done your thinking, then?”

“I’m still sort of doing it,” Jay admitted. “But I’d like to spend more time with you, and didn’t want you to think… you know. That you’d done anything wrong. Are… are you still up to helping me out with the house?”

Louis tilted his head, apparently curious. “Certainly. You’re still thinking of taking some things down to sell?”

“I have to. Otherwise I’m going to trip over something and die before I can deal with any of this anyway.” Jay said it a bit glibly, but it was, in all honesty, a very real possibility.

“…All right,” Louis said. He took down a peacoat from the coat rack next to the door and pulled it on, untucking his slightly overgrown blond hair from the back, all without disturbing his mask at all. “What do you need done?”

Jay gave him a smile as he lead the way back over to his house, which seemed to surprise Louis, who clutched his coat more tightly around himself. “I was thinking of packing up some of the extra junk. You said not to touch anything uncanny—can you tell?”

“…I can, yes.”

“Then help me find some of the bigger safe items so I can move it out. I can’t unpack any of my stuff until I’ve got rid of some of hers, you know?”

Louis nodded. “That did seem like it might be a problem. All right. We’ll assess vases and tables and all that.”

“And weird old appliances?” Jay joked.

“I don’t know that the antique store will take those,” Louis said. “But we can stop by the thrift store and donate anything they reject, if you like.” From the sound of his voice, he was smiling.

“We might have to,” Jay agreed. He held his door open and gestured with a nervous grandioseness. “Welcome to my home.”

Louis took a step in, looking around slowly: the mess in the hall, Aunt Grace’s shoe where Jay had thrown it, all the rest. “It really still feels like her. We’ll have to change that.”

Jay swallowed. “I guess so,” he admitted. “Let’s take a look at the living room first?”

They did a quick pass through the living room together, Louis declaring this clock, that statuette, this coffee table all unremarkable things, helping Jay pack the smaller items into the bin he’d taken his bedding from earlier, and move the bigger items out to the car.

They were far from done with the living room, but Jay directed him to the kitchen when the car was about half full—after all, he desperately needed counter space if he was going to be able to use the kitchen at all. Louis agreed that the grinder was probably a pasta maker, but it, like the toaster oven and a half-dozen other barely-used appliances, didn’t need to stay.

As Jay came back in from carrying the pasta maker out to the car, he saw Louis standing with a hand on the kitchen table, gazing down at the cover of the book there, not touching it. “My, uh, other immediate neighbor gave that to me,” Jay said. And then, probing a little, “Or rather, the guy who was there while my neighbor was out. I think he might be Nyar—the Crawling Chaos?” That last because he remembered Camden’s warning; he couldn’t really think that naming them would be such a big deal, but then, he wasn’t really sure he wanted to risk it if it were.

“Oh,” Louis said, with a remarkable lack of surprise. “That might be. As I said, I didn’t pry into your other neighbor’s business, but many cults in this world are to him in his myriad aspects. My god has no issue with him; that would also explain why Miss Bowen—who normally lives there—has never had issue with me.”

Just kind of staring at Louis, Jay prompted, “So it’s not weird to you that he came in person? You think that’s likely? That I really did just meet—something like that?”

“Mine cannot come so easily into this world. He? He always has. It’s never been unheard of to meet him.” Louis shrugged. “…I’m sorry, Jay, I’m really not easy to disturb about these things anymore. You’re a decade too late for that.”   

Jay wondered, abruptly, what Louis had been like a decade before. “Do you think I should keep talking to him?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it, personally,” Louis said, “but I don’t serve him, so why would I recommend it? He can be benevolent, if it serves his purposes, and he can be the cruellest thing imaginable. That’s what something having a thousand forms means; you don’t know what one you’ll get at any time.”

“And what about your god?” Jay asked him, quiet. “Is he benevolent or cruel?”

Louis seemed to consider that, the silence stretching too long. Then he just sort of sighed. “I don’t think you can consider him on that scale,” he said. “Entropy and atrophy just are. So is the King in Yellow. There’s a luxury to him that many enjoy, and a decay that many abhor. I don’t consider him evil, but he’s not good.”

“You don’t sound very devoted.”

“Oh, but I am,” Louis said, putting a hand over his heart. “Why would you love something that you lie to yourself about?”

That was fair enough, Jay supposed. He glanced over the cleared counter. “Well, come on,” he said. “That’s about all my car can hold. Let’s get this downtown.”

They finished packing the bin in the car, and Louis climbed into the passenger seat. Jay took a moment to contemplate the elegant curve of Louis’s ear where his hair, and the string from the mask, had tucked behind it, then got the car in gear.

The trip only took about twenty minutes—even coming from the edge of town, it wasn’t a long way, and Louis’s directions helped him get there quickly. He parked the car right outside the store. “Can you help me bring things in?”

For a moment, Louis hesitated. “I don’t know that I should—” But then he shrugged, as if his own reticence didn’t bother him any, and got out. “Sure.”

“It’s just that I’ll need to talk to, uh, Miss Dylan? About the goods, and—”

“And other things,” Louis said. “I’ll take them in and then go for a walk.”

“Thanks,” Jay said, grateful.

He helped Louis carry the bin in, then left Louis to help get the rest of the items wrangled out of the car and deposited as he looked around the shop.

It seemed surprisingly normal—he’d built himself up a little, imagining the type of antique stores you saw in horror movies, but it had the big open windows and clean counters he would have expected from one back home in Seattle. A variety of glass cases marked out browsing corridors, each filled with trinkets, dolls, and glassware; in a second room further back, he could see furniture and appliances.

“Miss Dylan?” he called out toward that room.

“You must be Jay Park.”

He jumped at the sound of her voice coming from right behind him, and turned to see a young woman grinning at him. She was around thirty, with short red hair, a face full of freckles, and visible fangs in her broad smile. She was wearing a flowery tunic dress over leggings, and was definitely cute, albeit in a way that reminded him absurdly of, of all people, Wolfsbane from the X-Men comics.

Kind of werewolfy.

“Hi,” he said. “Um… how did you know?”

“Not a huge number of Asian people here,” she said bluntly, which, to be fair, he’d noticed too. “Let alone any I haven’t met, let alone any who called ahead to say they were going to bring stuff over today or tomorrow. Let alone any as cute as their voice implied. Oh, I see you’ve got his lordship at your beck and call!”

Louis appeared to ignore the comment; Jay glanced between them. “He lives next door,” Jay said weakly. “He’s been very kind to me.”

“That’s a surprise!” she said. She offered a hand, tipped with, yes, definitely talons. “Anyway, call me Hannah. ‘Miss Dylan’ is my maiden aunt.”

“Uh—yeah,” Jay said. He took her hand and shook it. “Sorry, I thought you’d be older.”

“Because of the antique shop? Yeah, my aunt owns it, but these days she doesn’t do much. Took the wrong item in too carelessly. Now she doesn’t really show her face out and about anymore.” Hannah wrinkled her nose, like it was a great joke.

Jay desperately sought for something to say. “That sounds, uh—”

“I mean, hey, I get to own my own business at twenty-nine,” Hannah said. “So you know, looking on the bright side here. You want me to assess these things? Some of them are likely to be junk, but hey, you’re Grace’s boy, I’ll see what I can do.”

“If that’s okay,” Jay said. They both watched as Louis silently brought the last of Jay’s items in, inclined his head, and headed back out without another word. “And I also wanted to just… talk to you about some things?”

Hannah crouched, starting to dig through the bin Jay had brought. “Oh, yes, Mother said you might. What can I do you for?”

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